Dogged by misfortune

Unusually for a work of fiction, Tim Pears’ new novel opens with a spread of black-and-white photographs, part of an ‘investigator’s report’ into a fatal collision said to have taken place on a Birmingham dual carriageway in the summer of 1996.

Unusually for a work of fiction, Tim Pears’ new novel opens with a spread of black-and-white photographs, part of an ‘investigator’s report’ into a fatal collision said to have taken place on a Birmingham dual carriageway in the summer of 1996. The victim is a six year-old girl named, Sara Ithell. Her father, 35 year-old, Owen, loses both his right hand and his livelihood as a jobbing gardener to the local bourgeoisie. Of the brown mongrel dog, whose irruption onto a pelican crossing is supposed to have caused the accident, there is no sign.

Tim Pears’ books have two main fascinations: parents and children, and the environments they inhabit. Such tensions as they exhibit nearly always shift into gear when this rootedness in locale starts to break down. The first half of Landed, consequently, works in counterpoint, sketching out the crack-up of Owen’s marriage and his profound inner trauma, while harking back to the adolescent holidays spent with his grandparents on their Welsh border sheep-farm. Like the absence of the dog, grandpa and grandpa’s role as parent-substitutes — mother is a feckless hippy type who eventually decamps to King’s Lynn — may only be inferred.

Pears’ forte, as in his debut In The Place of Fallen Leaves (1993) is the natural-history set-piece. The accounts of teenaged Owen creeping off in search of a badger’s sett (he comes back months later to find it demolished by the ‘terrier men’) or poaching deer with grandpa (no gun involved — the old boy simply mugs them with a knife) have a kind of elemental savour, never sentimentalised and frequently skirting tragedy.