THE LIFTED BROW | Fiona Mozley's "Elmet"
"And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched" : A review of Fiona Mozley's 'Elmet' by Rachel Wilson
When we were still young children, my brother and I spent our holidays in Yorkshire, where my parents would rent a holiday cottage and take us on long walks in the countryside. As most childhood memories are, my recollections of the time are hazy, fail to take shape, devoid of characters other than my immediate family. Specific events are hard to recall but the atmosphere and the feeling lingers still. Though we would have been on summer holidays, Yorkshire comes back to me as a dark, dank and brooding landscape where I could play freely in the mud, spot horses battered by the wind in fields and see the occasional sheep carcass caught and abandoned in barbed wire along hedgerows. I was still small enough to believe in magic and watched the weather change with care, as though I could read the woodlands and the wildlife around. Yorkshire’s landscape is one where it’s easy to imagine England’s heritage, long before Empire, industrialism, Elizabethan poesy, even Tudor excess. This was the country of Robin Hood, Merlin, Boudicca, where our Celtic ancestors reigned and pagans left bodies dead and punished in the peat. Deep England, West Riding: the stage for Arthurian legends and the lustre of gold torques, so long ago it becomes hard to fathom chronology or timelines.
Full article: https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2017/12/15/and-if-the-hare-was-made-of-myths-then-so-too-was-the-land-at-which-she-scratched-a-review-of-fiona-mozleys-elmet-by-rachel-wilson