A remote, unidentified village on the north Cornwall coast, out of season, and disturbingly out of time, is the setting for Wyl Menmuir’s slim debut, a surprising inclusion on this year’s Man Booker longlist. Menmuir’s homespun horror has flashes of Daphne du Maurier’s ghost-gothic and John Wyndham’s dystopia while displaying its own individuality and flair. It’s the second Booker listing for independent publisher Salt, which initially made its name with a poetry list, now discontinued – although its editorial taste continues to veer in this direction, as Menmuir’s writing indicates.
It opens with a clifftop house, abandoned for 10 years following the mysterious death of its owner, Perran, being brought to the attention of the tiny fishing village below when a chimney begins to belch smoke. For Ethan, one of the small band of local fisherman whose nets are now virtually empty, the sign is ominous, not least because of his peculiar connection to Perran, a dominant figure in the fleet, who still exerts a sinister power over his fellow villagers.
The new inhabitant of the house is Timothy, an incomer from London, who has bought the property on the cheap. His reasons for buying are not immediately clear; the village is dauntingly inhospitable and far from idyllic. The seas, morosely fished by Ethan and the others, are heavily polluted, with Ethan informing Timothy, who risked a freezing dip: “If the tide doesn’t get you, the chems will. You want to stay healthy past forty, alive past fifty, you’ll remember to stay well out of the water.” It’s a rare example of dialogue in a novel soaked with interlocking dreams, huddled into itself and heavy with presentiment and doom. The characters and action move as if underwater, like a shoal of contaminated, drugged fish.
The village, trapped in its own isolation and insularity, seems forgotten by the outside world. The only intrusions are giant container ships, resembling “pictures hung on a featureless wall”, which appeared on the horizon by order of “the department” around the time of Perran’s death, faceless sentinels that seem to be moving by degrees ever closer to the shore, and a woman in grey who arrives in a car with tinted windows and, along with her besuited associates and their rolls of banknotes, takes silent delivery of the infrequent fishing successes. The dogfish Ethan hauls in are warped and pitiful: he wonders “who will buy this half-dead catch the sea has thrown up. Not restaurants, he’s sure of that. Perhaps the pharmas, hoping to extract god knows what from them”.
When Timothy joins a begrudging Ethan on a fishing trip, in the ironically named Great Hope, they sail, at his urging, dangerously close to the forbidden territory of the sinister container ships. The result is abundance, including an catch of fairytale silveriness the fishermen have never seen before. The taciturn hostility of the villagers towards Timothy grows more pointed and violent. But Timothy, compelled to return to a village he’d visited a decade previously, is, like Ethan, harbouring nothing more otherworldly than grief and loss. Its dislocating nature is beautifully expressed by Menmuir: the peeling wallpaper of Perran’s house, Timothy’s woefully thin socks and gin-fuelled fevers, his and Ethan’s parallel nightmares of submergence.
The Many is an unsettling parable, at 172 pages almost a novella, which takes in the contemporary urgency of falling fishing stocks, of EU quotas and dying communities. Menmuir is sturdily specific on the dwindling fish of the Atlantic – a lost litany of crab, char, shark and shrimp, and of the hazardous nature of fishing itself and its overwhelming loneliness. In a book of this length shortcomings stand out: over-earnestness and a danger of straying into Wicker Man-type territory, that is mostly avoided. On the whole Menmuir steers a steady course; the result is profound and discomfiting, and deserving of multiple readings.
• To order The Many for £7.37 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
