This powerful and original second novel by Edward Hogan, whose Blackmoor was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award, depicts a feral world. His small Derbyshire town of Detton, with its surrounding A-roads and supermarkets, its pub quiz nights and gossiping locals, barely contains some disruptive forces. Exotic animals escape from the wildlife centre up on Drum Hill, hawks and falcons are kept in ramshackle sheds, and the inhabitants have banked-up passionate pasts.
Maggie, widow of David, the upper-class owner of the wildlife centre, struggles with break-ins and falling visitor numbers, holding on to her romantic memories of being in love. Her stepson Christopher, a disturbed 16-stone teenager, constructs his own paranoid universe in which Formula One and internet dating compete with an idealisation of Robin Hood. Louisa, the falconer, lives as a recluse in her filthy cottage, still ruled by her teenage passion for David. Even Adam, the well-sorted male escort (“home visits and public accompaniment”), has previous: a child conceived when he was only 15 for whom he must provide financial support. Other local figures include Nelson Carter, up for a shag in a parked BMW, and the half-legendary Anna Cliff, mother of a brood of bastards. They drink heavily — whisky, beer, Drambuie, a round of sambucas in the White Hart — drive about in battered cars and spy through each other’s windows at night.
The world of the novel is tightly claustrophobic, mixing mythic elements and rural traditions into a continuing soap opera of guilty secrets and lusty desires. The characters move between forthright local speech (“He sounds a right knob-end”) and a repressive official language. Christopher covers his confusions with formulas copied from his mentors (“I just need some help with a particular matter”). Throughout, conversation’s comic banality — “the odd joke, avoidance, and a little snipe now and again” — is a means of hiding feelings whose origins lie in a history of cruelty and neglect.
Over a long bleak winter, events pile up, doors are slammed, tears are shed and lips split as men and women confront each other and are revealed to be both pathetic and admirable, strange but strangely human. Meanwhile, on Drum Hill in autumn the wasps “crawl drunk from grounded apples”; later the trees are “like whalebone corsets, the black wiring on the undergrowth, nowhere to hide but the soil”.
Hogan’s deft, laconic style moves us swiftly from scene to scene, visiting past and present, alternating comic and dramatic exchanges with fine descriptions of landscape, detailed accounts of animal husbandry and set pieces of close observation: the perfect, intricate left ear of a child killed in a shotgun accident; an ibex dying in the empty living room of a newly built house, a hawk with its feathers on fire. Smells and sounds are precisely noted.
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At times the symbolism can seem overdone, as in the explanation of the title: a hunger trace is the fault-line in a hawk’s feathers, a permanent mark of past neglect and undernourishment. And the rising floodwaters at the novel’s close are uneasily apocalyptic as the people we have come to understand are rushed towards their final fates. On the whole, however, The Hunger Trace is an impressive work, grimly bawdy, tense and moving.