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Ross Raisin: Raisin's Cain

11.02.08

Spend just a few pages in the company of Sam Marsdyke, the young farmer who narrates God's Own Country (Viking, March), and it's an unforgettable experience. Rare are the writers who have created such a funny yet terrifying narrator; the instant comparison is Francie Bradie in Patrick McCabe's classic The Butcher Boy.

Marsdyke's paranoid flights of fancy blend Yorkshire dialect and invented slang (blatherskite, lugger-bugger, gawby). We are drawn in, but very soon we realise that he has a dark history. As he watches a family from London move into the neighbouring farm, he picks out the teenage daughter: "She'd know me before too long. Not me, course, but my history, painted up in all the muckiest colours by some tosspot, gagging to set her against me."

We never discover the exact nature of the incident that got him thrown out of school, but fragments of memory suggest it was an attempted sexual assault. Yet despite this suspicion, and Marsdyke's precarious mental state, the reader will find themselves rooting for him. He's a fantasist and a brilliant ventriloquist, giving voice to his enemies, farm animals and inanimate objects alike.

Raisin says this uncomfortable ambiguity was intentional: "My impulse was to write a dark character with something alluring about them. If you create a sympathetic character, it makes the reader question why they commit the acts they do." In this case, the issue is whether Marsdyke's cold family background and demonisation by the community push him into more extreme acts. "I wanted to explore that mythological bogeyman figure. He becomes what everyone says he is. He believes he's mental, a rapist—as his mum says, he came out backward."

The story is so entrenched in the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors and its farms that it's a surprise that Raisin lives on a busy road in London's Finsbury Park. However, he grew up in rural West Yorkshire near Ilkley, after his parents had relocated from town. "Mum and dad became friendly with the local farmers, but it took 20 years," he says. While completing a creative writing MA at Goldsmiths in London, the Yorkshire Moors caught his imagination, and he returned to photograph its barren sweeps and shallow valleys.

He also wanted to address rural realities such as mental illness and poverty: "Public perception is wrong: farmers are quite isolated and ostracised people." Much of the book's humour comes from Marsdyke's observations of the ways of the "towns", which are gentrifying the valley: he can't understand why they dress up to go to the pub, or buy fancy jars of food.

Despite this, Marsdyke becomes obsessed with the girl neighbour, but, surprisingly, she reciprocates—she's bored, and fascinated by this loner. In late-night sessions, she learns lambing; at her behest they finally run away together, sleeping rough on the moors. But then Marsdyke's mind starts playing tricks. "As his reactions become more out of kilter, certain things tweak through to the reader," Raisin says. "As you question him, you question yourself."

Authors Ross Raisin debut authors

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