Book Review: Beastings, Benjamin Myers
Beastings, Benjamin Myers (2014)
My rating: 4 /5 stars
Book of 2022: 14
Read: 15/09 - 26/11/2022
When a teenage girl leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is called upon to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of a distant past, the girl fights starvation and the elements, encountering the hermits, farmers, and hunters who occupy the remote hillside communities. An American Southern Gothic tale set against the violent beauty of Northern England, Beastings is a sparse and poetic novel about morality, motherhood, and corruption.
She saw a life that was already set in place as hers was set from day one. (3)
Falling cords of drizzle (4)
He spoke at the volume of someone who lived outdoors someone more used to talking to dogs and cows and sheep. (4)
A world of shadows and sounds and smells and feelings rather than clear images. (6)
She could just make out the jagged line of the mountains looming like the great scaly back of a dormant beast that would one day wake and rise and swipe the town with a single brush of a limb. (8)
And now in each window life was happening. Behind curtains people were washing and eating and yawning. (9)
All the liquids of the world stirred together and dried down to the stain of him. (22)
His accent was thick the vowels swollen and cumbersome in his slack mouth. (24)
It bent double - a crude question mark against the landscape. (35)
It was as if they were equal. No - it was as if her words held some sort of power over him. (42)
She pictured a beach and beyond the beach water and then beyond the horizon an island with apple trees and pear trees and chickens and pigs and no people. (45)
She inhaled until the church became a copse again and the sweat on her back dried and became a cold metal disc. (46)
Dirt scalped and skin scratched. Tremble spent and nightmare haunted. (46)
A house awaiting death or something as hugely significant. That’s what that place had been. (47)
Things so unspeakable that they blurred with her nightmares to form a painful unreality in which she had begun to live almost permanently. (48)
Soon the fells would give way to those hills and then the hills would become mountains. (51)
A creaking of liquid. (52)
The Poacher started whistling one of his favourite drinking songs to fill the awkward gap that widened between them. (55)
Listening to the muted melody that the breeze played across the fells and the strange harmonies it created around rocks (56)
Everywhere around the girl the undergrowth was creeping and rustling and crackling and seething and breeding and watching. (58)
Her head felt light but her limbs felt heavy (58)
A cough that had been rattling at his lungs like a caged bear (59)
Come autumn it would be a brittle and burnt orange turning a flat brown (61)
One of mud and root and rock. A world reversed (63)
Small tree-filled rocky outcrops rising from the water like the tips of something unknown. (63)
And on sunny days they would stretch out on the rocks and let the water lap at their feet and in the winter months they would hibernate in a den so well made not a single drop of water would get through its walls and they would be safe and warm like birds in a nest. (64)
She looked at the way the mountain’s fells plunged straight down into the water over at the far side without even stopping to create a shore. (65)
The vast unknown of the water made her feel as uneasy as the solidity of the silent mountain provided comfort. (66)
The trees across the tarn were becoming washed out through the twilight haze and were blurring at the edges. (66)
The day had been the length of a month. (66)
The cold felt like nails being driven into the soles of her feet. (66)
It was too cold. She felt it in her bones. She was aware of her entire skeleton. (67)
And though she had barely eaten there seemed to be more of her than she remembered. (67)
Her body was taking care of itself. Blood and a pulse were all she needed. (67)
The evening had been the length of a year. (68)
The moon was dancing on the water that was still rippling from her disturbance. (68)
Submerged in the night - a part of the stone and the water and the fell and the stars. (68)
Her husband sulked and seethed with the same look of quiet resentment toward every living thing that the girl had seen in every man (69)
She experienced feelings that were new and scary and alien and beautiful (69)
In these objects she created secrets and these secrets signalled baby steps towards a daring new direction awaiting exploration. (69)
No chores or soot or the fists of drunken men. No interference no violation. No nocturnal visitations. Just she and the baby at peace. (70)
The milk teeth of a man-child thought the Poacher. (72)
Her ears rang and fire spread across her face. (76)
My child stung her. The bairn was their child. More hers than his even. He might have seeded her but it was she who had borne it and she who had birthed it. (77)
The tears that came were not at being lost but at being found. (78)
The night was not a foe. (78)
It was people that made her fearful people and their ways. (79)
The dark did not scare her but those it could hide did. (79)
A bird started singing and then another and then the conversation grew all around her. (79)
A band of artificial colours and blocked-out lines unfamiliar against the jumbled green tones of the scrub. (80)
The day was a fresh candle just lit (80)
I wandered lonely as a cloud. (82)
Yet when he spoke it was in a voice at odds with his appearance. His vowels were crisp and warm (83)
I still dream of the day when people’s tastes will turn and they might start respecting their fellow creatures. (84)
All those straight lines and right angles. (84)
Because you can’t feel lonely with nature as your companion. (84)
They’d rather stop indoors where the view stays the same. (85)
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowned on a velvet cushion. (85)
So it goes yan tan tethera methera pimp. Sethera lethera hover dovera dick. Doesn’t that sound so much better than the language we use to express our numerals? (87)
Find it pays to learn something new every day if you can he said. (88)
Some people like to read literature - me I read maps and make lists. (89)
The sky says it’s going to be torrential and I’ve never known the sky to lie. (90)
Might let those soul-locked demons of the subconscious out and incriminate himself. (91)
It was cut through with misunderstanding. (91)
She didn’t know why but for once she just had to take the risk that perhaps not ever human wanted to use or destroy her. (93)
She would teach the bairn about life by showing it life. (93)
Anxiety ate at her. (94)
The water was cold the water was bracing the water set her flesh to tighten. (94)
The sky had spoken and the sky had said stay. (95)
Blankets on the floorboards of a loveless house. (97)
I didn’t underline any more. I could have done, I just didn’t have a pen on the bus with me.
This one took me so long to finish, not because the writing was bad or the plot wasn’t compelling. I had simply been in an energy slump. I reached around page 90, and then life got very busy and the days got shorter and work got more intense. Naturally, I found myself getting to the evening and wanting to loaf, not concentrate on words on a page.
A coach ride to London and back sorted me right out, and I power read the last 130 or so pages. Compelling, enticing, electric. This book is great.
The writing was its sparkling feature. So many dizzying descriptions make your brain fizz and your insides scream. Brilliant.
The plot was a dark one at times, painting a shocking and brutal description of desperation.
Our protagonist carries so much hurt and trauma and fear. Set against the vastness of the north west, it juxtaposes the life she is running from. A beautiful, hopeful backdrop.
It’s then dirtied by the ever-closer figure of the Priest. Throughout, we slowly understand what he’s done. Why he is desperate to have her back. Why she is so desperate to get away. His role in the clergy, as patriarch of the town, might not (no surprise her) be all it seems.
This figure encroaches on our protagonist, both physically and mentally, through her memories. We understand why she’s escaping, and why she is taking this baby with her.
The ending threw me for a big ol’ surprise, but was a brilliant end to a great read: ‘What bairn she said.’ (221)
Thank you very much to the estranged surfer and his cancer sun and his fucking aquarius moon for sending it to me.
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