“OK, so, you can hopefully arrange some time off,” says the consultant to Anita, the central figure in Ross Raisin’s deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy fourth novel. Her husband’s early onset dementia will mean emotional incontinence, aggression, loss of recognition. It’s assumed that Anita’s job will shrink into the far corners of her new life as a carer. From the consultant’s perspective she’s only a cook. “No – I’m a chef,” she says, firmly. That’s what she is and what she does, and it matters as much as the doctor’s work matters to him. A Hunger is the story of how Anita confronts the conflicting demands of work and care, how she weighs past wrongs and present duties, and how she faces the desperately difficult questions that dominate the small hours of so many carers whose partners have asked not to be left suffering.
Ross Raisin made his name in 2008 with God’s Own Country, vividly narrated in the strong Yorkshire dialect of a disturbed young man adrift. It was so pungent that readers expected more from that same rural world. Instead, in Waterline (2011) we got a Clyde shipbuilder enduring the loneliness of grief. Then came A Natural (2017), with its subtly sustained portrait of a gay footballer carrying on his career in the lower leagues where the spotlights don’t reach. Each time, the immersion in particular circumstances is so complete that I have caught myself wondering if Raisin is a farmer, a shipbuilder, a footballer, a carer. Then I remember with relief that I don’t need to know: he is a novelist.
