Ross Raisin’s first novel, the much admired God’s Own Country, did with great conviction what few other contemporary British novelists seem able to do — give a convincing voice to the marginalised. A first-person narrative framed as a thriller, Raisin’s portrait of a dysfunctional Yorkshire misfit who kidnaps a local girl was particularly striking for the wholly satisfying way in which it got inside its central character’s head, avoiding any shred of sentimentality or condescension as it did so.
In his second novel, Raisin aims to perform the same trick again, but this time without the safety net of the thriller framework.
Narrow in focus, and almost wilfully unshowy, Waterline is a deliberately stripped-down affair that jettisons nearly everything — subplot, style, action — in its single-minded attempt to make its central character, a rheumy-eyed Glaswegian down-and-out, believable. For a young author barely embarked on his writing career, such a low-key exercise represents a pretty substantial risk.
The individual on whom Raisin focuses is a former Clydeside shipworker called Mick, a buttoned-up, undemonstrative man who has just lost his wife Cathy to cancer (caused by the asbestos he has been bringing home from work) and is now struggling to stay afloat in the wake of her funeral. Mick, we quickly come to realise, relied almost completely on Cathy to organise his world; in any social engagement, it was he who was always the silent partner, “listening politely while Cathy said everything that was needed”. When, after the funeral, the extended family finally leaves (his wife’s unappealing relatives back to the Highlands, his favourite son Robbie to Australia, his more bitter son Craig to the other side of Glasgow), this distant and distracted man is thrown back on himself — and collapses under the weight of his own emotional inertia.
What follows could have been disastrously clichéd and frankly rather dour — a rapidly accelerating mental and physical decline that sees Mick seek first seclusion, then the bottle, and then, in a helter-skelter escape from his house and its ghosts, the streets of London, where he becomes a dishwasher and then a tramp.
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But what impresses about Raisin is the all-encompassing nature of his imaginative empathy, and the way in which he makes the reader complicit in his character’s fate. Mick’s muteness is mirrored in prose that is clipped and flat, his emotional stuntedness is matched by scenes that are rarely dramatic, but Raisin still manages to extract remarkable fire from his seemingly damped-down prose. In one electric passage, Mick tags along with Craig on a visit to the local pub, intent on bridging the chasm between them, but ends up simply sitting there in agonised silence with his son, nursing a pint as they absently watch the football on the television.
Not everything in Waterline quite works. The early pages, as Mick’s world begins to collapse and he gradually sinks into despair, can seem drawn out and lacking in drive, and Raisin, in seeking to make Mick come to terms with his past, takes, I think, a wrong turn at the end. But in nearly every other way Waterline succeeds in the task it has set itself, and makes one admire both Raisin’s determination to forge his own path, and the skill with which he has done so.