Book Review: This is a story which starts grim and gets even grimmer

This is a story which starts grim and gets grimmer. We join ‘the Girl’ on the run across the remote Cumbrian landscape, carrying a baby which is not hers. Not biologically anyway. She’s being pursued by ‘the Priest’, a drugged-up child abuser who has enlisted the help of ‘the Poacher’ to track the girl and her cargo.

What follows resembles a vivid and prolonged anxiety dream - the priest chasing the girl and the baby for days that turn into weeks, going to increasingly extreme lengths to find them.

Myers describes the landscape in which he sets this extraordinary novel as ‘the Cumbria you don’t see on Countryfile.’ The mountains, woods and lakes, and the weather that moves through them, serve as both threat and sanctuary to the girl. For those of us used to the Lake District of day trips with a rucksack full of sandwiches, it’s a powerful reminder of how bleak and inhospitable vast tracts of the county are.

The book was inspired by a cutting in a local history book about a mute girl who went on the run with a baby only to reappear three months later in a different town. Myers takes that nugget and turns it into something so tangible you can feel, smell and taste it. When there’s anything to taste, that is. The girl and the baby spend most of the book desperately hungry - this is a story that will definitely make you appreciate your tea.

As we approach the ending, things get sicker, then sicker still, then sicker again, while never losing any of Myers’s formidable literary skill. This book renders the word ‘unputdownable’ a truth. There was no way I was getting any sleep until I’d finished it. It’s brutal but so immersive, this is escapism in the literal sense.

Myers is one of the most versatile authors writing today - Beastings is closer to The Gallows Pole than The Offing in style, but still demonstrates incredible adaptability. This is obscenely good writing. Wow.