Few books have such a damply pungent sense of place as Tom Cox’s intriguing first novel. Its setting is the fictional village of Underhill and the moorland that surrounds it, and Cox heralds his time “living and walking” on Dartmoor as inspiration. Fittingly, Villager gives us a landscape of wonder, the peaty soil thick with history while folk tales and gossip fill its contours with life.
Cox’s writing career has been propelled by a rich variety of enthusiasms. His 2007 memoir Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia described his disastrous attempt to become a professional golfer; his other memoirs, podcasts, blogs and tweets feature everything from vinyl (he once reviewed music for the Guardian) to hills, sheep, interior design, pixies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and his many cats.
Villager is as curious and wide-ranging as you might expect. While it’s billed as Cox’s first novel, you could almost call it his second short-story collection, following the ghostly Help the Witch, set in the Peak District. In this new book, 12 chapters and multiple narrators tell stories that reach from prehistory to 2099, and their accounts of Underhill and its residents are packed with digressive colour.
Villager crams newts, bees, microwave meals, sheela na gigs, a gravedigger, a defunct Facebook group called “Pylons I have known” and the grumpy ghost of a horse into its cascade of narratives. We follow a librarian and her housemate; a golf-loving teenager; a rock biographer and a self-aware search engine. The legend of RJ McKendree, an American who moved to the village in 1968 and recorded a haunting set of songs before vanishing, surfaces again and again. The most frequent narrator is an earth spirit that watches the land and its people evolve, and remembers “the deep thick black that went before”.
The result is a book with all the urgency of a Sunday ramble: an epic, oddball soap opera soundtracked by folk music, birdsong and the rattle of hedgerows against car windows. Not all Cox’s voices convince, but a fascinating world emerges, full of quirks, mysteries and echoes of the past. Bit-part players thrive in the margins: the loathsome Cavendish family, who sell moorland for a theme park, a drunk sound engineer called Chickpea and an old man who lives in a beach hut and once swam for Devon.
The countryside is both a character and a stage, and Cox’s earth spirit relishes the stories of the men and women who have called its hills and valleys home. Yet the real drama in Villager comes less from any of its individual actors than from the fear that the show may not go on. Development brings railways that shatter silence, and climate heating that shifts seasons. As the 21st century marches on, augmented reality visors sever the connection between many locals and their landscape. “The planet as it had been known for the last few thousand years,” forecasts one visor refusenik in 2043, “would end soon.”
Yet if our world’s vulnerability is at Villager’s heart, so is its strength. Cox’s novel suggests a symbiotic relationship between people and land, a shared joy and history with deep roots that can flourish where least expected. Those who listen to the landscape hear a rush of water that is “never going to stop”, that will “keep being the same but different, long after we’re gone”. Villager is a paean to the organic and the creative: the earth and water of the moor, the crackle of a record, the tales and relationships that make a community. Its psychedelic tangle suggests that our short lives can nourish the landscape, if we watch our step. As long as we open our eyes and ears to nature’s glory – and, presumably, don’t go on Twitter too often – there is still hope for our future.
• Villager by Tom Cox is published by Unbound (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
