Kindle. Peasant/tenant sheep farming in the fells of Cumbria, better known as the Lake District. It starts circa 2001 during the foot-and-mouth outbreak that lead to huge animal culls and ends in the present day. Nearby village Bewrith in the Curdale Valley does not exist, but why not? Other mentioned locations like Kendal and Carlisle, the geographical limits of Cumberland Wrestling, do.
The sheep massacre leads to a depeopling and the hardy folk who remain are in need of new flocks. Our narrator abandons a promising career of lorry driving and abides on his frenemy-neighbour's property after being drafted into the slaughter when the paid help flees. They go a-rustling somewhere a bit south, liberating a large mob of purebreds from a tourist farm. The successive heists are wanton and the story degenerates into relations amongst violent men; we're shown that our boy is educated and isn't a victim but has never been one to make things happen. There's a bit of wish fulfilment in the form of a girl from school, now married to the neighbour but so obviously better than all that. The breaking point, when it comes, is both expected and completely arbitrary.
I enjoyed the writing, leaving aside an excess of 'owt' and 'nowt'. It reminded me a bit of Tim Winton: forceful and direct, capturing the place, people and patois, the occasional excess of metaphor and motif. It made me realise that Winton's done littoral zones, the outback and cities but not farming. Initially I thought I might be in for something as crystalline as Atticus Lish's first but things fall away with the seasons. Preston's handling of his characters is as brutal as anything Irvine Welsh has done. Leaving that aside there are parallels with Greenvoe: a similar sense of isolation, a place lost in and out of time, tourism a future that's killed the old human geography. I'm guessing the descriptions of animal treatment turn a lot of people off.
Colin Barrett for the New York Times. Christopher de Bellaigue: rewilding, cottages now holiday rental properties with all the modcons. A farmer not taking a government handout is unrealistic. Ah yes, there's a drove, just like there has to be. Goodreads seems to be warming to it. Clare Clark dug it for the Guardian.
