In the novelist Benjamin Myers’s first short story collection, men look at a changing world and feel left behind.
Farm labourers are replaced with GPS-operated heavy machinery. They remember rivers, now despoiled, that gave them their first sense of the natural world. They go out hunting in the midwinter of the past and return with one fox between them: “Today we are lesser men.”
They are music journalists who live alone and get laughed at by young, privately educated guitarists for using analogue dictaphones. They get mangled, inside and out. There isn’t any valorisation, on the author’s part, of the place they occupied or their world that was replaced. Just acknowledgement.
Myers comes from Co Durham, where my parents grew up. The most moving writing in Male Tears focuses on life where “creosote-stained fences demarcated the struggle between new suburban and old rural”. In Ten Men, a young narrator – “I was eleven then and had already been nailing the tabs two years” – follows an itinerant labourer around his uncle’s farm. What he learns about masculinity and gender fluidity is quietly done, and speaks in ways Myers’s men themselves often won’t.
Macabre energy
In 2018 Myers won the Walter Scott Prize for his 18th century-set novel The Gallows Pole. The macabre energy and oral storytelling quality of that book is echoed here in The Whip Hand, where a family of modern showmen force their debtors to build a monument to a dead patriarch. But there’s something in the past itself which suits Myers, providing a ground to offset his grit and consistently strong writing about the natural world. The finest showing here, The Longest, Brightest Day, is set in the farthest reaches I have been taken to by recent fiction: the very beginning of mass agriculture in Britain.
A man and a woman known simply as “the man” and “the woman” bring a drove of swine through Neolithic England to a stone circle, avoiding new human settlements and farms that have begun to spring up. They hope to conceive a child. Myers gives them offerings to perform and navigation techniques to employ, and the meanings he provides for some of the most enigmatic structures ever built by human hands are convincing.
A herd of wild horses is beautifully described: “Their twitching nostrils are wet and flared and their eyes are wide and black and wild as they search for something unseen, the target of their desires buried deep within the collective abandon of the wild charge.” I would have happily read a longer piece of historical – or rather prehistorical – fiction by Myers extending his vision of this world.
Going by the other stories, only this deep in the past can a true uxoriousness and structurally untainted relationship between the sexes be glimpsed. “She is skilled and brave too,” the man thinks of the woman. “She can craft things and she has the knowledge of the land. Is useful with her hands. She can lift. Navigate. Forage. Manage the animals.” He has “a feeling of a need to protect but also a reliance upon her too.” Eden doesn’t last long. The bargain our couple strikes with another man – and the fertility ritual the woman performs with him – is as classic a patriarchal con as you can imagine.
Literary festivals
Most of the better stories have already appeared elsewhere: won prizes, been commissioned by literary festivals or made available as stand-alones. Additions, with notable exceptions, tend to be a bit on the thin side: a couple of pages which communicate a change over time, but not the compressed heft to which they perhaps aspire.
A funny squib about a seedy, ex-bad-boy novelist used to advances beyond his books’ worth, is told entirely through backstory or summary. The washed-up Bill Katz finds himself “in an era in which the old, deeply rooted totems of patriarchy were falling hard and fast around him”. But in terms of modern letters, is not Myers’s preferred combination of form and content – unflashy, stolid, hard-edge and hard body portrayals of silent or gruff types – one of these deeply-rooted totems?
The slightly neutral, restrained lyricism Myers favours here is popular among contemporary writers. But the subject matter of Male Tears exaggerates this mode’s reliance on a vocabulary of bodily tension. The book opens with a hare, “the taut sinews of its legs flexing”. A sky elsewhere is “stretched tight across the city”; “The air is a piece of elastic that has been pulled to snapping point”; “the air appears to be stretched so tightly that it hums”; “in the fire’s glare every muscle of his short, taut body, every cord, seemed coiled in readiness for the task ahead”.
So much sinew. When the prose doesn’t bulge it withholds, and can mirror the tight-lipped men described. I often felt the stories in Male Tears guarded whatever vulnerability they contained too preciously, and wanted them to hazard more.
