Landed by Tim Pears: review

By Lorna Bradbury Published: 6:10AM GMT 20 Feb 2010

On Friday 18 June 1996 I attended the scene of this incident on Fielding Avenue, Selly Oak, Birmingham, as part of my overall analysis." As fictional opening lines go, this observation, part of a police report of a fatal collision, doesnt count among the more memorable.

The report, as one might expect, is dense with technical details of cars, speed limits, street lighting and has photographs of the scene of the accident. But if it is true to life, it adds little to the drama beyond the exposition of the facts: that a man has been injured and the passenger, his young daughter, killed.

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The subsequent case histories that are woven into the plot of Landed the notes of an occupational therapist who treats the driver after the accident, the drivers statement to an organisation that provides support to fathers denied access to their children feel just as superfluous. One wonders why the author does not tell the story straight.

For the story, when it comes, is powerful: it shows the grief that overwhelms a parent at the death of a child and, as in Blenheim Orchard, Tim Pearss last novel, the darkness that lies beneath the surface of a superficially happy family; it is also a rhapsodic account of the pull of the land.

Perhaps the most successful sections of the book are early on when the young Owen, the injured driver in the car crash many years later, is staying with his grandparents at their farm in the hills above Welshpool. His parents are trying, unsuccessfully, to rescue their marriage, and Owens brooding grandfather, silent apart from occasional growls, "the monosyllables of a primitive language", takes the boy under his wing. He teaches him how to catch rabbits, split logs, imitate the calls of birds.

There are several incidents that impress themselves on the readers mind. Owen nearly drowns in a bog after helping his grandfather trap a doe. "He could not breathe. His lungs were on fire. Gagging, he needed to open his mouth." Later, he watches a sett of badgers, night after night. It is eventually destroyed by a gang of local badger baiters, leaving Owen "perplexed with grief". We know, even now, that all will not turn out well for this sensitive boy who cant fit in.

Owens life seems to come together when he meets Mel a few years later. "He come gradually out of his self when it were just the two of us," Mel remembers, after the accident. "Had everything I needed, then Mel walked in and I knew Id been living half a life," Owen says. They might have been damaged, but they found strength in each other. There were good times marriage, children, a steady life with Owens prospering gardening business but then the car accident happens and tears everything apart.

If the first half of the novel dramatises Owens childhood and the fallout from the crash his refuge in alcoholism, grieving for his daughter and crippled by phantom pain in his missing arm the second half is a more linear account of his abduction of Josh and Holly, his children. Owen turns up at the school and persuades their teachers to let them leave one cant help thinking that the school would have phoned the childrens mother to check out Owens story and they set off on an arduous journey, completed mostly on foot, foraging for berries as they go, to the Welsh hills of Owens childhood.

Owen teaches Josh about the countryside, as his grandfather taught him and, though the children are wary, the three of them become closer: bathing in a freezing stream, sleeping side by side in the fields ("Owen inhaled the scent of his sleeping son"). But the adventure is reckless, and puts the children at great risk. Owen might achieve a kind of peace, but this happens at a cost to his sanity.

Though Landed is structurally flawed, and sometimes strains the readers credulity, there is no denying Pearss achievement in the character of Owen, a raw, desperate man even before he is filled up with grief, and his deeply poetic descriptions of an old-fashioned life on the land.

Landed

by Tim Pears

230PP, William Heinemann, £12.99

Buy now for £11.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or from Telegraph Books