Although I had some serious reservations about the first hundred pages of Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole, particularly regarding its mythologisation of its nativist protagonist, I found the novel taking a more critical turn and I ended up admiring it. I reviewed it at length this week for Splice:
Consider the poetry of the tarn. Does it even exist? Glaciers, waterfalls, windswept moors: these are the features of landscape typically taken up for romanticisation. Tarns tend to be disregarded, ugly black pools fringed with reeds, or else construed as the dwelling places of demons, hags, Grendel’s mother. If there’s any hope for a poetry of such things, it’s to be penned by way of an inverse romance: a celebration of mud and muck, spindles and gorse, the suck and squelch of claggy soil, and an adoration of the guttural language which, in its own peculiar way, breathes a beautiful onomatopoeia into these usually maligned aspects of terra Britannica. But not content with simply pulling poetry from the tarn and its dreary surrounds, Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole is a novel that aims for something more difficult. It trains its gaze upon a group of hardbitten, weatherbeaten men who find the tarn a thing of beauty anyway, regardless of any attempts at romanticisation, and it sets out to give voice to their latent poetic sensibilities.
Infinite Patience 