The best sort of magic realism

Michael Fishwick’s new novel tells the story of a young man called Robbie, who has been uprooted from his London home after his mother’s death. He finds himself in rural Dorset, where he inhabits a capacious present that has ample room for the intrusions of the mythic past.

Struggling with his loss, Robbie has taken to using arson to express his rage — which is why his father, having rapidly acquired a new partner and a couple of stepdaughters, has moved the family to his old childhood home to make a new start. But it’s an ancient start that this landscape has on offer. Robbie makes friends with a girl called Mags, just a few years older than he is, but a wise woman before her time, and she immediately introduces him to the folklore of the area, and in particular to the poetry associated with hares — creatures that defy fire. Fishwick understands that myths are best served neat, without explanation to dilute and maybe dispel them, so he describes the apparition of a white hare with admirable grace and simplicity, communicating its radiance without striving for literary effect: ‘Her ears were long and tapered like a bird’s wings, her body hunched like a question mark. She was so bright and so near, and there seemed to be a light about her . . .’

This stylistic directness enables him to integrate the varied ingredients of his tale into a single whole. When Robbie describes a sunset as ‘awesome’, the word is exactly poised between modern idiom and ancient wonder. Fishwick combines the pangs of bereavement and the perturbations of adolescence, exploring (often with a comic touch) family tensions as well as the terrors of the deep past, and all the time propelling his narrative along with an adventure that unfolds in the present.