Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Villager', by Tom Cox (2022)

You might remember me writing about Emma Tennant’s novel Queen of Stones, the feminisation of Lord of the Flies that culminates bloodily on the Isle of Portland. I’d been led to that in the first place by Lady Arlen recommending Tom Cox’s novel Villager, via his evocation of the weirdness of the Portland landscape on his website. He’s been around for ages, but Her Ladyship’s tip was the first I’d heard of him.

You often hear it stated that in this or that book ‘the landscape is itself a character’, and in Villager that is quite literally the case, so if you can’t swallow that device you’re not going to get very far. This would be a shame, as the chapters where the moorland that shadows Underhill – a place which, if it were real, would just be on the edge of Dartmoor – speaks for itself are short and self-contained, while the rest is an emotional and psychological tonic for the jaded 21^st-century. Mr Cox’s other fiction has been in short-story form and this book builds a novel out of a collection of linked stories, zipping backward and forward from the present to the near-past and the near-future. Some of the characters know one another, and a person mentioned in one chapter might get their chance to be the centre of attention in another, set in another time; so by the end you have built up a patchwork portrait of this place and the individuals within it. One episode is told via messages posted to a village Whatsapp group, while another (set the farthest in the future) is related through the protagonist’s conversation with an AI search engine, so I suspect this book would be called ‘experimental’ if it was about horrible happenings done by dreadful people, but it’s not: most of the characters we meet are pleasantly ordinary, there is a good deal of generous humour, and even if there are deaths and floods they are no more than most of us might expect to encounter from time to time. This concentration on the small and undramatic means almost certainly that Villager is destined to be treated as less clever and accomplished than it is. It is humane and kind and other things that critics don’t rate that highly, but anyone else can read it and be a little uplifted by finding the human spirit, and its place in the creation, affirmed.