Already tipped for the Man Booker Prize shortlist, Carys Davies' debut novella is tailor-made for a movie as it details a crazed journey through the American outback in search of a semi-mythical creature.
Cy Belman, a middle-aged widower, leaves his small holding in nineteenth century Pennsylvania to set off on an obsessive quest. He has read in a newspaper article about the bones of an ancient mammoth with tiny ears and huge tusks which have been found in Kentucky. Belman, who originally came from England, believes that such creatures are still rambling tall and fearsome in unmapped territory beyond the Mississippi River. They may well be familiar still to the Sioux and the Pawnee in those mysterious lands to the great West.
Belman's quest takes on the air of a religious or evangelical mission, all the more so given that he has more or less abandoned churchgoing. The dangerous pilgrimage is filling a vacuum - the vacuum left as his faith falters. Or it may be that he is unhinged following the loss of his beloved wife Elsie. It is a tribute to Davies that such speculation about the motive for his perilous undertaking is not indulged in. She leaves it to the reader to think about the catalyst for Belman's arduous trek on horseback, on foot and by boat, in the company of his guide, a young Indian boy .
The tale is tinged with a certain bleakness from the off, by virtue of the fact that the traveller is effectively abandoning his young daughter Bess, not yet a teenager. He leaves her in the hands of his gruffly querulous sister Julia, who reluctantly agrees to shut up her own house and live at his place to look after Bess.
A 2016/17 fellowship at the New York Public Library was instrumental in the writing of the Welsh writer's 149-page novella. She has won numerous awards for her short stories, gathered in two previous collections. The title story of her second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.
Davies spins a convincing story that never loses focus on what it should be doing - keeping us interested in what happens to Belman and what is happening back home, typically related in alternate chapters. The author has an acute sense of period, and an ear for dialogue.
Recommended.
