THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BRIDGE
by Mary Lawson
Chatto £12.99 pp273

Pisgah, Missouri is a place where, between the compass points of small-town sadness and incipient madness, can be found backwoods violence, incestuous desire and all kinds of festering secrets. Thrust into this alien world during the 1950s is the serially abandoned Rajiv Travers, a half-Indian, half-English youngster left in the care of his dead uncle’s mistress. Despite the feral bigotry of the more atavistic elements of a community largely populated by misfits and rapists-in-waiting, the exotic outsider discovers a sense of belonging among his peers. The hero’s most intimate bond is with pretty Annie, while his most tragic is with Rousseau-esque Lewis, a beautiful but mentally scarred nature boy tortured by the events of a fateful night several years earlier when his autistic brother was mysteriously murdered.

Murr’s Man Booker-longlisted novel is an eloquently constructed fiction, in which vivid, noir-like flashbacks of the homicidal nocturnal confederacy of the town’s wastrels cast a disturbingly gothic shadow over the adolescents’ rites of passage and grimly herald the unravelling of Lewis’s sanity. That the book is not the complete article can arguably be deduced from the way it was pipped to the prize’s shortlist by two superior coming-of-age novels, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men and MJ Hyland’s Carry Me Down, which outshine it in emotional power and imaginative reach respectively. What is clear, though, is that Murr’s verbal chiaroscuro of darkness and light, inky imagery and sun-dappled lyricism creates a vision of lost innocence — “That place where there is no time, where nothing grows old, nothing changes, nothing dies” — that both haunts and bewitches.

His fellow longlist nominee Lawson’s follow-up to her bestselling Crow Lake again maps out the austere hinterlands of northern Canada with the exactness of a cartographer and the watchfulness of a landscape painter. The narrative recounts the thorny relationship of brothers Arthur and Jake Dunn as they grow up on a farm during the 1930s. The ox-like Arthur is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but what he lacks in brains he makes up for in graft and goodness. The same cannot be said of his quick-witted yet sly sibling, to whom he reluctantly plays protector, save for one near-fatal childhood dereliction of the heedless Jake that sows the seeds of a lasting antipathy. However, it is not until two decades later, when Ian, the disgruntled teenage offspring of the local doctor, develops an obsession with Arthur’s attractive wife, Laura, that the estranged brothers’ bitter harvest of enmity, resentment and spite is tragically reaped.

Lawson’s measured prose is good at communicating the warp and weft of communal life, and how its fragile rhythms are easily disrupted by the destructive force of war, the sudden loss of loved ones or, in the case of Jake’s ill-starred reappearance after a 15-year absence, the return of a prodigal son. Where the ground sags under the author’s feet is in her rather schematic portraits of the siblings, which rarely evolve beyond either the homespun (Arthur, the gentle giant, is as immutable as the land on which he toils; Jake, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, is never as charismatic as the writer would have us believe) or the parabolic (Cain and Abel are among the novel’s biblical resonances). Lawson’s quiet artistry has many virtues, but her black-and-white characterisation, unnourished by moral complexity or ambivalence, has its dramatic limitations.

Available at the Books First price of £13.49 (Murr) and £11.69 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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