Daniel Wiles’s brutal, breviloquent debut novel opens with the first of many striking scenes that make strange and freshly terrifying a well-worn chapter in British history: the Industrial Revolution. Picture a dozen people trapped in a cage suspended on a huge iron chain, while beyond its bars, legions more scurry around a “vast sea of black land”. When eventually the cage moves, with a sound like “the cracking of fingerbones”, its momentum is downwards, deep into the belly of the Earth, where lamplit tunnels are filled with satanic bellowing, sweat and chokedamp.
The year is 1872 and the setting a small Black Country village whose landscape and social fabric are being savagely refashioned by its three collieries. Among those caged miners is Michael Cash, who has taken a second job in order to send his six-year-old son to school. Having himself started work while still a boy, labour that’s left him scarred by memories too lightless to coalesce into pictures, he’s determined that this won’t be his lad’s fate. But when taking that second job loses him his first, he feels his careful plan slipping through his fingers.
