Ross Raisin’s debut novel takes its title from the not always ironic way that Yorkshiremen of a certain age refer to their own county. Set in the wilderness of the North Yorks Moors and narrated by Sam Marsden, a nineteen-year-old whose reliability we are never entirely certain of, it combines elements of comedy, suspense and teenage angst to impressive effect.
Sam, we soon learn, is nineteen-years-old but was forced out of school at the age of fifteen for the attempted rape of a younger girl. (Sam initially says the girl was willing, but this immediately suspicious assertion grows more questionable as the novel progresses). Since the incident, he’s had no other choice than to live and work on his parents’ farm, ostracised by the local people and reduced to a helpless bystander as the countryside is gradually colonised by ‘towns’, downsizers from the South who’ve come to the area because Devon and the Yorkshire Dales are already overrun.
Lonely and bored, Sam is reduced to playing tricks on ramblers and inventing richly comic conversations with everything from sheep to seagulls. Then a family of towns moves into the neighbouring farm and he strikes up a strange, halting friendship with the family’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Jo. Jo is an archetypal teenage rebel, horrified by her parents’ decision to abandon Muswell Hill for this rough countryside devoid of civilisation. At first, Sam seems no match for her urban sophistication, and reading between the lines, we see make the most of his attraction to her as she manipulates him for the purposes of her rebellion against her parents. However, when Jo decides to run away from home and asks Sam to accompany her, the power relationships shift until what was fun is incredibly dangerous.
In Sam’s use of Yorkshire dialect, Raisin novel pulls off the same trick as Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange or Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker of placing us in a world that is linguistically strange but which rapidly becomes familiar. Although there is an occasional moment when Raisin’s ear fails him, overall it’s a stunning act of vocalisation, and has the added effect of slowly drawing us into Sam’s world and making sure that we sympathise with him rather than the towns or his exhausted and uncomprehending parents. Raisin shows us that Sam – bored, feckless and with a nasty streak of violence running through him – is a more accurate reflection of life in the North Yorks Moors than Heartbeat, whose fans flock there in tourist buses and are constantly disappointed by the failure of reality to live up to TV.
A compelling read from its opening chapter, God’s Own Country leads the reader forwards with an increasingly appalling sense of moral discomfort. And then it fails to deliver. The ending of the main narrative is surprising, but only in that a book so unflinchingly written and observed should lose its grip on reality in order to deliver a happy ending far more suited to Heartbeat than itself. It’s as if Raisin loved creating his protagonist so much that in the end he couldn’t bring himself to damn him. The disappointment this leaves is further compounded by a baffling final chapter narrated from prison that, in its contrived menace, reads like a parody of a Hollywood voiceover; it promises a potential sequel, but fails to be truly sinister.
Yet this dissatisfaction only strikes the reader because everything that has come before has been so enthralling, and the impressiveness of Sam’s voice and Raisin’s control of atmosphere easily outweighs any sense of disappointment. With his first novel, Raisin has shown a deft manipulation of style and language, but it’s to be hoped that, in future novels, he will realise that if it’s worth the effort to create such a convincing voice/character, the ending should be true to it.