Michael Cash is a hewer – he descends into the subterranean shafts and tunnels of the Black Country to swing a pickaxe at the seams of coal that run there. If a more perilous occupation exists in England in the 1870s, then it perhaps belongs only to the often-orphaned children who are paid a pittance to drag the wagons that Michael and his colleagues fill, and whipped if they stop to scratch the sores made by the chains that bind them.
Here, subterranean stalls propped up by planks can collapse instantly, killing those who made them, and noxious gases permeate. In a good week, Michael earns enough to buy leeks and potatoes with which his new wife can make broth to feed the family, but not enough to pay for his six-year-old son Luke’s schooling. A bony roach or two lifted from a dreary pond supplements their diet. Like so many miners, Michael’s main motivation is preventing his son from having to follow him down into the Dante-esque circles of hell that Daniel Wiles brilliantly evokes in this confident and moving debut.
Sun-starved life above ground in a cruel November isn’t much better. Here, “ossdrawn barges churned up silt from the cut floor as they slithered past … One boat held so many people that some nippers even swam behind it in the dark matter, only visible by the light that hung behind the boat. Dogs swam with them, their eyes reflecting like buoyed beacons.” A change in fortune comes when Michael and his fellow hewer Cain secretly discover a seam of gold, and suddenly we’re in a proto-Klondike world, had the Yukon gold rush been chronicled by a far less florid DH Lawrence.
The lump of gold provides one of the few flashes of light in a soot-covered West Midlands that is otherwise defined by poverty and hardship, so it comes as little surprise when the violent Cain double-crosses Michael. He is then forced to travel to Dudley by barge, an epic autumnal journey that feels as weighted with foreboding as Marlow’s in Heart of Darkness. Here we see the Industrial Revolution (and by extension, the British empire) as it really was: merciless and driven entirely by greed and exploitation.
Wiles’s writing throughout is as chiselled and pure as the sedimentary rock from which carbonised coal is created, while the equally pared-down Black Country dialect – all compressed consonants and flattened vowels – is poetically minimalist: “Ow bist yow?” men nod to one another. Though the relentless hardship on display initially leans towards steely US writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Ron Rash and Daniel Woodrell, in Michael there’s also a quiet nobility and stoic sense of morality towards those even less fortunate that recalls Claire Keegan’s masterful recent novella Small Things Like These.
The unforgiving land itself is a central character. “Mercia gives and teks,” Michael recalls his father saying, using the Anglo-Saxon name for the heartland of England. “All of life’s fates explained by this one simple rule. There is no give without take, and Mercia’s take was always fair.” There are few words wasted here, and only when the book ends do we learn that Mercia has taken more than enough: the novel is inspired by real events and dedicated to 22 men and boys who died in the colliery disaster at Pelsall Hall near Walsall in 1872. A granite obelisk erected in their memory still stands today, though Mercia’s Take is an equally powerful tribute to all those who toiled at the coalfaces across Britain so that an avaricious empire might expand, whatever the cost.
• Benjamin Myers’s short story collection Male Tears is published by Bloomsbury. Mercia’s Take by Daniel Wiles is published by Swift (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
