I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn’t leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way. [p. 41]
The narrator of this novel, known only as Tonto, is in therapy, because he's been lurking outside his brother's house. His brother (author of My Second Life with God) is the only person who Tonto really understands: their parents, who Tonto refers to as Mummer and Farther (masked; distant), are staunch Catholics. Mummer is addicted to ritual, Farther is emotionally absent.
Reading a news item about the discovery of a child's remains in a landslide, Tonto recalls their last visit to the Loney, a desolate stretch of Lancashire coastline, some time in the mid-Seventies. Mummer, Farther and the boys used to make an annual pilgrimage to the area, to visit St Anne's shrine and pray for Hanny's recovery -- for Hanny was mute and had learning difficulties as a child. That last pilgrimage, shortly after the death of much-loved Father Wilfred, was led by a younger man, Father Bernard. Mummer does not take to him, though he makes a great effort to befriend the boys.
Time is strange at the Loney: apple trees in fruit at Easter, a swarm of butterflies above a field, green grass instead of dead vegetation. The locals are strange, too, prone to cryptic warnings and superstitious habits. And there are strangers in the area, a sharp-looking chap in a Daimler, speeding down the country lanes with a woman and a young girl. They're heading for Thessaly, an imposing house on the tidal island of Coldbarrow. Hanny becomes obsessed with the girl, Else.
Mummer hopes for a miracle, and strives for it through prayer. But if there are miracles here, they are not the sort to be approved by the Catholic Church.
The Loney has a marvellously gothic sensibility, and some truly gorgeous prose. It's a slow and subtle book, where the unnatural is never explicit but always present. Is it a horror novel? With another narrator (or another author) it might be framed as a fantasy, or as a story of unreliable perceptions, or as magic realism. Perhaps the unease comes from the tension between religious faith and its absence: The Loney explores faith, and the loss of it, in ways that go beyond the religious aspects. Father Wilfred's crisis of belief is achingly desolate, Mummer's dependence on ritual anatomised.
I was reminded of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and, to a lesser extent, The Bone Clocks. Maybe it's the youth of the protagonist, and the sense of an adolescent world that can never be understood by adults. Or perhaps it's a certain clarity of vision, a way of looking at the world. I don't think Tonto is quite as self-aware as Mitchell's narrators, but he sees enough to recognise what is happening at Thessaly. No wonder he's in therapy.
I really enjoyed this novel, despite shuddering at the evocation of dank, cold countryside in the Seventies -- a setting reminiscent of my own childhood.
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