BOOK REVIEW- ELMET

Mozley's Elmet is a gothic, modern day fable as she shies away from conventions of dialogue-heavy realism in order to build the foundations for a myth. The initial conflict will open questions about land ownership versus a kind of pre-capitalist brotherhood of people living on land together, where a piece of paper stating one's legal assets is laughable and redundant This is not the only allegory Mozley forces us to consider as, during the progression of the narrative, Elmet's message about the ownership of bodies becomes clear.

Mr Price, our aptly named antagonist, is a manifestation of the values we as a modern society have accepted as normal For him, bodies are commercial capital, a tool for profit and upwards social mobility.

Mozley sets Daddy up in binary opposition to him as his overriding ideology is that they live in a "world of muscles", an attractively simplistic worldview free from the complicated politics of our time When he declares "my body is my own, it is all I own" he embodies a fatal masculinity and a harsh, almost medieval landscape where the ethos is kill or be killed But what about the time when they cannot hide behind Daddy's “soft pillowy muscles"? For all Daddy's teachings about nature, he fails to consider the time in which his strength will inevitably fade and the children that he has "othered" will become vulnerable. Mozley plants this question as a seed in our minds that remains shelved until the final third of the novel. The answer? Tragedy

By Hannah Sewell

Nevertheless, the family unit orbits around Daddy. In the words of Mozley, he is a "masculine archetype straight out of mythology". To his children he is their shelter, their moral compass, their patriarch Daddy plants their roots in nature and knows his children will emulate his values and rejection of modernity and materialism He seems to inoculate a love of simple pleasures: a cup of tea, a game of cards, the warmth of a fire As a reader, we at first fall in love with their minimalism, with their simple way of living free from the preoccupations of the modern world and wonder how much easier life would be if society was rebuilt to emulate the ways of our ancestors. The reference to emblems of the modern world, the "television" that the children begged for in Chapter Two and the "radios" and the "trucks" seem jarring at first. It speaks of Mozley's skill that she managed to create a novel that would be able to slot in neatly to any era as she navigates around timeless dilemmas.

Mozley manages to weave contemporary issues regarding gender seamlessly into her novel. The dichotomy between the bare knuckled Daddy and our sensitive narrator Daniel forces us to ask questions regarding gender identity. For Daniel, with the colossal shadow of his father's goliath shadow looming over him, his conception of masculinity is primitive to the point that he admits at one point that he "never thought of himself as a man" and arguably becomes a surrogate mother to Cathy and Daddy in the wake of Granny Morely's death.

Vivien, the only mouthpiece for alternative views that the children have access to, compares the male need for violence to that of a breaching whale In Elmet, nature is a living being, and the spirit of the earth underpins everything and is the reason for all.

But where does this world of muscles and violence leave Cathy? Through her struggle to reconcile the duality of her identity (her Daddy's mindset with her female body), Cathy doesn't see her body as an asset but rather as a threat to her survival. When looking at Vivian's hips, Cathy finds her hips "disgusting", asking "Can you imagine trying to run away from someone when you ’ re being pulled back by your own bones?" It's crucial that attack is at the forefront of her mind because she thinks in a way that is different to the narrative predominantly dominated by men and, unlike the readers, isn't fully submerged in the good guys versus bad guys. While we root for the cabin in the copse and the days spent chopping wood, Cathy sees that a tolerance of masculinity comes at a price: women's safety In this way, Elmet manages to subvert a masculine myth into a fable of women's sexual terror

However, I believe we shelter in the idea that this tale is nothing more than a myth with larger-than-life characters As much as Cathy and Daniel do, we hope that Daddy will be this infallible war-god they believe him to be, always just, always victorious. We hope that Cathies really do exist, the type of girl who can repeat the feat of beating up her primary school bullies for ever. We can hardly imagine that Cathy suffered sexual violence in the margins of Elmet, this girl who had constantly had her power underestimated by men. Why do we want to shroud the entirety of the story under a mythical haze? Because grappling with the reality of sexual assault is uncomfortable and very much at odds with the refreshingly simple idyllic masculine world Daddy presents to us and we so want to believe in Our willingness to push it into the same mythical distance as the rest of Mozley’s allegory says a lot about us as readers