- 1 I would like to thank Polina Levontin for her suggestions to the text.
- 2 For reasons of space and focus, this article cannot do full justice to Kingsnorth’s complex politi (...)
1This article explores Zoe Gilbert’s debut work, Folk, which both delighted and baffled its readers upon publication in 2018.1 Their confusion took two forms. On the one hand, reviewers struggled to categorise what kind of book Folk was—a novel or a collection of stories? On the other hand, they attempted to make sense of this openly mythopoeic work as a response to the 2016 Brexit referendum, although several parts of it had been published beforehand. The present contribution takes both responses and sees them as mutually intertwined. Firstly, taking at face value Gilbert’s definition of Folk as a novel, the article positions the text as a mosaic novel, a term rarely used in short story criticism but found frequently elsewhere, especially in fantasy and science fiction. The early sections of the article examine how voice became an integral part of fiction-writing after the heights of postmodernism in the 1970s, and how the mosaic novel responds to the blurred boundaries between novel and short story. In particular, the form traverses their traditional preoccupations—the novel’s concern with the life of the nation and the short story’s concern with its submerged communities. From there, the article investigates how the ambiguity of the mosaic novel can, firstly, be used to address the ambivalent responses to Brexit, and secondly, the uncertain relationship of the Isle of Man (the basis for Folk’s fictional setting) to the political mainland. Also, by drawing contrasts between Gilbert and one of her reviewers, the novelist and political activist Paul Kingsnorth,2 the article demonstrates how Gilbert foregrounds a series of questions about the historical uses of “folk” in how she represents her fictional community. Lastly, the article returns to the theme of bafflement, through a close reading of the text, in order to show how Gilbert faithfully renders her otherwise fantastical characters and landscape. Neither strictly folklore nor magical realism, Folk not only withdraws into itself, becoming opaque to the reader, but also suggests that its “folk,” its dramatis personae, remain unintelligible, neither the organic community conserved by folk revivalists nor a homogeneous mass whose intentions can be understood one way or the other by middle-class commentators.
2Published to almost unanimous praise, Folk also mystified its readers as to what kind of fiction it was. Kate Saunders, for example, acknowledged it as Gilbert’s debut novel but then also described it as “dreamlike,” “a series of vivid prose-poems,” “filled with submerged references to famous fairytales,” and “evident” of “the author’s skill with a short story” (17). Saunders continued by referring to Gilbert’s “wonderful eye for detail and the intensity of her snapshot descriptions” that build towards “a portrait of a whole village” (17). Similarly, Clare Saxby referred to the novel as “really a collage of short stories” (22), while Benjamin Myers called it “a tapestry of character studies and fables untethered from time,” a “palimpsest” in which “tradition and myth are laid over one another.” Although Alex Preston insisted that “[i]t makes sense to treat [Folk] as a novel,” because of its “deep sense of . . . place” and “continuity of style and atmosphere,” he also referred to it as being “full of eldritch, dreamlike stories,” “each [of which] can be read as a standalone piece.” Somewhat desperately, he concluded by writing that Folk pushes “at the edges of what we mean when we call a book a novel.” More combatively, Paul Kingsnorth declared that Folk is “neither a novel nor a collection of stories” but “a map of the British mythic imagination”: “real folk culture” that “has a core of darkness to it” (“New appetite”).
3The author herself, though, is unequivocal about Folk’s generic status despite the pattern of its genesis. Firstly, it began as the centrepiece of Gilbert’s PhD thesis on the influence of folktales in contemporary fiction. Secondly, the story/chapter, “Fishskin, Hareskin,” won the Costa Short Story Award in 2014, while many of the other pieces appeared originally in magazines and anthologies. Yet Gilbert declares the book to be a novel. Speaking to Lauren Miller, she explains:
I aimed to write about characters in the same community, . . . sharing their friends, landscapes, haunts and events. Their stories gradually came together as a chronological account of life in Neverness over a generation, which only really makes sense now if read in order. Hence, Folk is a novel. (“Zoe Gilbert”)
The key elements, then, in Gilbert’s defence of Folk as a novel are recurring characters, the communal backdrop, the physical setting, shared happenings and, above all, chronology or a sequential reading. However, although Gilbert indicates that the events of Folk take place over the course of a generation, the senses of duration and time passing, which arguably are integral to the novel form (Lukács 122), are noticeably absent from her text. Instead, the elements that Gilbert enumerates also fit comfortably with the formalist and structuralist definitions of the short story cycle or short story sequence, as advanced by such respective critics as Forrest Ingram and Robert Luscher.
4This is not, however, a case of setting the author straight. As student, writer and tutor, Gilbert is hardly unaware of short story theory and needs no lessons from that quarter. A more productive response then is to ask why Gilbert insists upon her work’s novelistic status even while her readers point to its more unstable generic aspects. An obvious reaction would be to say that it suits her publisher for Gilbert to do so, since publishers have historically been averse to selling work as short story collections. However, even if Gilbert objected to her fiction being published as a novel, that would not be a deal-breaker: publishers have been quite content to label books as novels whether that meets with the author’s preference or not. In other words, a commercial imperative cannot be the absolute answer. Instead, we have to look more closely at the entangled relationship between the novel and the short story in post-war fiction.
5A productive place to start is Grace Paley’s intervention to the 1975 “symposium on fiction” published a year later in Shenandoah. Paley’s fellow panellists were the existentialist novelist, Walker Percy, the writer and theoretician William Gass, and Paley’s neighbourhood friend, the short storywriter Donald Barthelme. The symposium occurred at the height of what might be called the first wave of US postmodern fiction, in the wake of such novels and short story collections as Barthelme’s City Life (1970), Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1969) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Gass, in particular, insisted upon the self-referentiality of the text: the author’s responsibility is not to the mimetic representation of external reality, as in the social realist novel, but “to the total validity and coherence of his [fictional] system” (Barthelme et al. 10), in which the reader cannot fill “in anything behind the language” (8). Paley objected to this exclusive view of fiction-writing, arguing not only can a sense of place be evoked but that fiction also relies upon a dialogue between writers and readers, which is historically and culturally situated. As Paley says: “This language of ours, here in this country, is always being refreshed and scrambled up and knocked around. It’s always coming up from the bottom, again and again” (20).
6Towards the end of the symposium, Barthelme pointedly turns the conversation away from Gass and Percy and asks Paley about storytelling. Paley responds:
When you talk about new forms or different forms, it seems to me this non-linearity has really run its course, played its game out. . . . I wonder about our need for storytelling in its most simple linear sense of what happened then, and then what happened, and what came next. . . . I think a lot of it has to do with speaking aloud and with the word as a said thing. . . . Just as language rises again and again from new voices . . . [so] do new forms come or old forms turn round on that wheel, come again and again as new people tell stories. I think particularly at this point of women. . . . Different people, new people are telling stories, and women haven’t told stories yet, not really. I think of myself as a woman who has been in a tradition which is largely male. (27-28)
Paley’s recognition of her subaltern status not only aligns her with such near-contemporaries as Kate Millett and Adrienne Rich, but also with the feminist rewriting of folklore that began in earnest with Anne Sexton, and was most famously exemplified by Angela Carter, an acknowledged influence upon Gilbert. As Jeffrey Eugenides observed to Jonathan Safran Foer in 2002: “it was Grace Paley who turned out to be right. . . . Postmodernism hit a dead end, and what took over were the kind of books—call them multicultural or whatever you want—that Paley was prophesying” (Eugenides). However, it is Paley’s final challenge that speaks most to the form and content of Folk: “Is there a way for people to tell stories to one another again and to bring one another into that kind of speaking and listening and attending community?” (Barthelme et al. 31).
7As Jeff Birkenstein has argued of the short story cycle, one of the form’s chief aims is the evocation of “a larger community” (498) rather than the protagonists of any single story. James Nagel observes that, in the years after Paley’s intervention, the short story cycle in America became “patently multicultural” (4-5) with texts by such writers as Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich and Amy Tan. The incorporation, though, of Native, Chicano and Asian American voices into the short story cycle was only one manifestation whereby orality became a constituent element of contemporary fiction. The magical realism associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and ’70s had already foregrounded the roles of voice and storytelling whilst postcolonial literatures, most clearly in the work of a writer such as Salman Rushdie, invested heavily in the reclamation not only of subaltern voices but also the heteroglossia (“many-voicedness”) of national communities. Younger postmodern writers, such as Martin Amis in writing his novel Money (1984), gambled on the importance of voice: “they’re babble novels, but it’s such a marvellous thing to be writing one of those, it feels that you’re much more untrammelled, you don’t have these architectural drawings in your mind” (Amis 67). At the same time, a range of historians, philosophers, political analysts, and cultural critics—but particularly those associated with, or entering into, postcolonial discourse—were questioning the concept of “nationhood.” Perhaps most influential was Benedict Anderson’s redefinition of the nation as “an imagined political community” (6) in which the nation, far from being an ancient or immutable given, was refigured as the sum of people’s individual and collective cultural yearnings: an uneven, unfinished, hybrid and protean formation. To dramatize the national condition now was to trust to individual voices and their imaginaries, the less trammelled expression—to adapt Amis’s gamble—as opposed to the pre-set “architectural drawing” of the nation.
8By the 1990s, when the efforts of postcolonial writers to write back to the former imperial heartlands were well-established, white British authors also began to trouble the homogeneous appearance of the nation-state by utilising subaltern voices, non-linear time-schemes, and a mix of narrative modes. Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton (1992), focusing upon a single fictional village over the course of three hundred years and told episodically in different literary and non-literary forms, is exemplary. Although published as a novel, it bears characteristics of the short story cycle as well as the tension between the oral tradition and increasingly technological means of communication. Following Ulverton, texts such as David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), subtitled “A Novel in Nine Parts,” and Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), continued to unpick the novel form: an incoherence perfectly attuned to the embattled concept of the nation-state in an era of globalisation, mass migrations, digital communications, and prophetic warnings of climate change. As the Arabic scholar Sabry Hafez has argued, whereas the novel historically tends towards “the large fresco,” the short story concentrates upon “the small fragments” (38), that is to say, the mosaic.
9Although “short story cycle” remains the most used description for the form within short story criticism (D’hoker 151-52), the proliferation of competing taxonomies during the 1990s—composite novel, short story novel, novel-in-stories—suggests the increasingly desperate means by which critics attempted to come to terms with the blurring between “novel” and “short story” in the same period. Science fiction and fantasy writers had already sidestepped the problem, however, in order to sustain the short story as an economically viable form whilst the short story market contracted and the novel market grew. American science fiction, in particular, had long featured the use of the “fix-up”: an author’s reassembling of previously published stories into a larger, more continuous narrative; the most famous example of which is probably Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1951). In 1987, George R. R. Martin subtitled the first of his multi-author anthologies, Wild Cards, “a mosaic novel.” As Jeff Prucher’s definition of the term suggests, “a book of short stories that share a common setting or characters and which taken together form a larger narrative” (121), it is practically synonymous with the short story cycle. However, unlike single-author short story cycles or interlinked anthologies which, albeit cyclical, episodic or non-linear, are still self-contained, the term “mosaic” evokes the rhizomatic quality of Martin’s assemblages. Wild Cards began as a role-playing game that established both the posthuman scenario and an initial cast of characters; grew into a seemingly endless series of anthologies and uncollected stories; acquired new editors and writers along the way; and crossed over into other media. Since then, other writers who desire greater generic freedom, such as the Serbian fabulist Zoran Živković, have identified their work as mosaic novels; Živokić’s latest title, The White Room (2022), replicates elements from his previous twenty-two books as a kind of fractal map to his fiction. Nonetheless, the term remains contentious: in 2017, Lavie Tidhar’s superb Central Station was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, although several of its chapters/stories had previously been published elsewhere.
10Consequently, when Gilbert, a writer steeped in genre fiction although not necessarily wanting to be defined by genre, describes Folk as a novel, despite its many associations with the short story, it is probably the mosaic novel to which she alludes. The word “novel” lends her work a visibility that the short story cycle might not, but the word “mosaic” indicates the formal flexibility which Gilbert desires. Attempts to taxonomize Folk as a short story cycle not only override Gilbert’s preferences but also evade the blurring of generic distinctions outlined above. However, in seeking to trust to the voices and perspectives of her fantastical characters, and to expand novelistic convention through the reinjection of the oral tradition, Gilbert nonetheless engages with the nationalist politics that such experiments foreground. If, as Hafez argues, the novel is traditionally preoccupied with “the large fresco” of the nation, then “the small fragments” addressed both by the short story cycle and the mosaic novel act as a residuum of social and cultural experience unreconciled into what Fredric Jameson once controversially termed the “national allegory” (69).
11In his review of Folk, Myers is drawn irresistibly to a comparison with the post-Brexit settlement: “one can’t help but read Zoe Gilbert’s tale of . . . an inward-facing society imprisoned by the sea, as a dark historical mirror held up to the harried face of modern Britain.” Gilbert herself is quick to distance her uses of folklore from the imagined communities advanced by the far Right: “a kind of lazy nostalgia for Merrie England—the kind Ukip and even more nationalist groups would like us to entertain” (“Zoe Gilbert”). The potential appropriation of Folk to a backward-looking ultra-conservatism is evident in Kingsnorth’s review where he juxtaposes what he regards as the book’s “real mythology . . . a core that both repels and entices” with contemporary literary fiction that skates “along the surface of modern urban life, engaging with the ‘interiority’ of the middle-class mind . . . [a] placid, smug dullness about which it’s mostly impossible to care: an Ian McEwan-isation of the soul” (“New appetite”). Kingsnorth’s critique of an insular metropolitan elite is quite distinct, though, from that of the Marxist weird fiction author, China Miéville, who for different reasons decries McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005), set against the backdrop of the global anti-war demonstrations of 15 February 2003:
Saturday quite bolshily said, “OK, you accuse us of a neurotic obsession with insularity and a certain milieu. I’m going to take the most extraordinary political event that has happened in Britain for however many years and I am going to doggedly interiorise it and depoliticise it with a certain type of limpid prose.” . . . It was a combative novel that met that sense of there being a crisis and de-crisised it through its absolute fidelity to a set of generic tropes. (qtd. in Jordan; emphasis in original)
Whereas Miéville argues that McEwan’s novel actively seeks to neutralise the political crisis surrounding the imminent invasion of Iraq, Kingsnorth’s criticism is that writers such as McEwan seek to falsify and paper over what he regards as authentic English culture. Although Gilbert was one of many readers to praise Kingsnorth’s creation of a “distinctive voice” in his medieval novel The Wake (2014) (Gilbert, “CUT chats”), her political trajectory has diverged from his: Kingsnorth’s encomium to non-metropolitan English identities has led him to support the Brexit referendum (Kingsnorth, “Brexit Reconsidered”), and more recently, to justify the stance of anti-vaxxing campaigners (Kingsnorth, “Vaccine Moment”).
12The dramatic tensions in the uses to which folklore can be put foreground the nationalist politics that underline folk culture. However, the territory that inspired Gilbert’s writing played no part in the Brexit vote. As Gilbert notes in her acknowledgements, the stories were influenced by her family home of the Isle of Man, “a place of gorse-scented inspiration and fantastic folk tales” (238). In interviews, though, Gilbert has hesitated over the extent to which her imaginary island of Neverness maps onto reality: although “its shape and its landscape” are indebted to the Isle of Man, its “world” is what “you find inside a Western European folktale” (“Zoe Gilbert”). Speaking to Suzy Holland, Gilbert argues that only one of the stories in Folk, “Water Bull Bride,” is directly related to a piece of Manx folklore; the rest of the collection is “more like a homage to the Isle of Man’s rich folk history” (Holland, “Magical Story”). Consequently, Neverness’s connection to the Isle of Man is ambiguous: like the fidelity of a world described in a folktale, “it is—it is not” (Čapek 58). The island’s fictional relationship to its real-life model simultaneously mediates Gilbert’s émigré status, tied to the Isle of Man by family but resident in London (now Folkestone, Kent) at the time of Folk’s publication.
13The ambiguity of Neverness’s mediation of Manx culture also dramatizes the ambivalent relationship between the Isle of Man and the United Kingdom. Politically, the island has been a Crown Dependency since 1828, which means that it is neither part of the UK nor a British Overseas Territory (such as the Falkland Islands). Instead, the island is self-governing but retains the British monarch as the head of state, known as the Lord of Mann, with a Lieutenant Governor acting as his representative. The UK is responsible for the island’s defence and for representing it internationally, but UK legislation can only be introduced to the island with the consent of the local government. For example, although homosexuality was gradually decriminalised on the mainland from 1967 onwards, on the Isle of Man, same-sex relationships were only legally recognised in 1992. Unlike the UK, the island was never a member of the European Union, only part of the customs territory, and so its population could not vote in the Brexit referendum. The Isle of Man’s link with the EU, however, was only partially dependent upon the UK’s membership: on matters such as taxation, which were not covered by the former protocols, the Isle of Man maintains both a diplomatic relationship with EU officials and an office in Brussels. At the same time, though, the Isle of Man Government claims that, due to the Brexit process, there is now a deeper understanding between itself and the Westminster Government, which has helped to consolidate the idea of a “wider British family.”
14Whilst such a concept is ideologically beneficial for both parties, it disguises a further element of the Isle of Man’s economic relationship with the UK. Unlike the other Crown Dependencies of Guernsey and Jersey, the Isle of Man has a Common Purse Agreement, which means that for being in a customs union with the UK, the island receives a share of the UK’s Customs and Excise revenue. The exact amount of this share is unknown, but whilst UK exports to the Isle of Man benefit from the lack of duties, the island benefits significantly from UK tourists. As Stephen Royle has demonstrated, the Isle of Man Bank prides its financial success upon the island’s insularity (178-79), but in reality, the Manx economy is considerably boosted by external ties—its trading relationship with the UK, tourism, and the island’s status as an offshore financial centre. As the release of the Paradise Papers in 2017 revealed, the Isle of Man’s low tax regime (partially funded by what it receives from the UK) attracted a range of international criminal activities, including tax evasion and money laundering, a vast flow of money that poured into the City of London via shell companies created in the Isle of Man (Gartside, “After successive”). Crucially, none of this wealth—however illegally gained—benefitted the working poor in the island’s major towns (Gartside, “After successive”; Hodson, “Isle of Man”).
15Again, it is important to note that Gilbert does not regard Folk as an allegorical representation of the Isle of Man. But at the same time, by focusing upon the lives of a rural proletarian community, Gilbert alludes to the divisions within Manx society. While the Isle of Man Government seeks to foster familial ties with its Westminster counterpart, many of the island’s citizens have been excluded from the cash bonanza that has come in the form of UK revenue, tourism, international finance, and the island’s casinos. However, precisely because Gilbert does not render these lives mimetically but suffuses them with myth and folklore, she does not slip into the same trap as Kingsnorth by regarding their existence as somehow more authentic than the lives of a cosmopolitan elite. Instead, Gilbert’s oblique representation raises questions about the very meaning of the idea of “folk.”
16The English word “folk” is a cognate of the German Volk, meaning “people.” The adjective völkisch (meaning “national” or “ethnic”) was integral to the German nationalist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, a call to Volksseele (“national soul”) was hardly exclusive to German nationalism: by the end of the nineteenth century, such beliefs were commonplace throughout the nations of Europe, often imbricated with racist and anti-Semitic ideologies, and justified by corrupted readings of Darwinism and other pseudo-sciences of racial superiority (Weber 5-8). As the historian J. R. Jones has argued, the British Right, sceptical of free trade and internationalism, sought “to increase its strength and influence” within the Tory Party in the years leading up to World War One (46). This was the same period in which the virulently racist G. K. Chesterton denounced the cosmopolitanism of Rudyard Kipling, and penned his poem “The Secret People” (1907), which eerily prefigures the post-Brexit sentiments of Kingsnorth (Wright).
17This period was also when Sophia Morrison published her definitive edition of Manx fairy tales (1911). Although Morrison assembled the largest repository of Manx folklore, a cornerstone not only for Gilbert but also the short stories of her predecessor Nigel Kneale, she only made it available to an Anglophone audience by translating the Manx language into a poeticised rural dialect. Morrison’s compilation, beautification and publication of the Manx tales was not unlike what Cecil Sharp was doing contemporaneously in his dissemination of traditional English folksongs. Although later, more left-leaning collectors such as A. L. Lloyd decried Sharp’s editing of the folksong tradition, the folk historian Georgina Boyes has gone further in her critique of Sharp. For Boyes, the English Folk Revival of the 1910s, associated with such figures as Sharp, Hubert Parry and Ralph Vaughan Williams, fashioned an idea of “the Folk,” for without it “there would be no rationale” for the Revival itself (Boyes 18). Influenced by late Victorian antiquarians such as Andrew Lang, who were in turn inspired by the comparative anthropology of E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), the folk revivalists constructed an idea of the Folk as untouched by progress, a living vestige of an earlier stage of social development. Such a construction, Boyes argues, was necessary because, in the face of modernity, it supplied an enduring justification for racial superiority, “the inferiority of women,” imperial dominance and “the existence of class stratification” (9). What the folk revivalists could not entertain, however, was when actual working men and women improvised and changed their songs, stories, and dances: the folk culture was meant to be a static reflection of an unsophisticated and unchanging people (11-12). Consequently, for the good of the nation, the folk revivalists appropriated that culture and became its custodians at the expense of the Folk who were idealised as a noble yet dying species. As Boyes writes:
The culture of the Folk was a heritage common to all—it was the product of the race, not of the working class. In a society threatened internally by division through inequality, folk culture represented an uncontaminated and non-aligned source from which all later, less innocent forms developed. (36)
A century on from the English Folk Revival, and Kingsnorth recommends his readers “to hear” the voice of the English through its folksongs—tales of lament—oblivious, it would seem, of the extent to which the Revival appropriated and transformed that culture for its own nationalistic purposes (Kingsnorth, “Uncertain future”).
18By contrast, Gilbert does not root her stories within the remnants of indigenous Manx culture. Instead, Manx folklore acts as a patina, a surface covering or atmospheric veil that layers what is otherwise a set of fictionalised rituals specific to the imaginary community of Neverness. In other words, Gilbert evokes the folkloric but does not subscribe to it. She avoids therefore not only the trap of portraying Neverness as an allegorical representation of the Isle of Man but also as an authentic repository of folk culture; and the political risks that ensue. Instead, by faithfully depicting the individual lives of her community, Gilbert inoculates her writing against mystification, that is to say, the ideological concealment of a mythologised Folk. Rather, Gilbert lays bare the harshness of their existence, not as lament, but as a critique of how such lives are, in the real world, often reified—for instance, in the Isle of Man Government’s focus upon the island’s financial wealth at the expense of its working population. Gilbert’s position with regards to folklore is not unlike Daisy Johnson’s view of magical realism when writing her interlinked collection Fen (2016):
Female characters can often be distanced, made mystic and mysterious in magical realism and that is not what I wanted to do. I wanted these to be real women, facing everyday problems who were also watching their worlds distort, turn strange. (Johnson 201)
Similarly, Gilbert does not mystify the lives of her characters but in rendering their “opacity,” their “subsistence within an irreducible singularity” (Glissant 190), she estranges the reader’s perception of their own world. In that sense, although seemingly otherworldly, the characters of Folk resemble “the little folk,” the disregarded peasantry who plough their lives and ply their trade seemingly aloof from world-historical events, as in J. P. Hebel’s “Unexpected Reunion” (1811):
King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, the French Revolution came and the long war began, and the Emperor Leopold II was buried. Napoleon defeated Prussia, the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the farmers sowed and reaped. The millers ground the corn, the blacksmiths wielded their hammers, and the miners dug for seams of metal in their workplace under the ground. (26)
19Very little academic criticism has yet been published on Gilbert’s fiction. What has appeared has attempted to taxonomize Gilbert’s writing in terms of voguish concepts such as “folk horror.” However, as Sophie Parkes-Nield notes, although Folk shares some of the motifs associated with the sub-genre, in other respects it differs quite strongly: Gilbert’s invented customs are designed “to introduce her reader to the ruthlessness of this unpredictable world”; she does not “claim to show us clandestine, real-world folklore, survived from another time” (59). Consequently, as noted above, the effect of reading Folk is not one of recognition or identification, but of irreality, of hovering between familiar and unfamiliar rituals, landscapes, and psychologies.
20Much of this effect is due to Gilbert’s commitment to the act of worldbuilding, not as allegorical representation, but as an end in itself. Neverness as a community is bound by rituals shaped by the landscape, climate, and geology of the island. The gorse-burning rite dramatised in “Prick Song” is one such example. Although there is a similar ritual in Manx folklore, known as “burn the buitch,” which is designed to drive out evil on the evening of 30 April (or Oie Voaldyn), Gilbert sets her festival at the end of the calendar year, thus invoking such North European events as Walpurgisnacht. The spectre at the heart of the ritual, the Gorse Mother, evokes East European figures such as Baba Yaga, but instead of warding off evil, the rite is principally concerned with heralding the new year: it features competition between the boys and girls and is preoccupied with themes of initiation, sacrifice and desire. The object of gorse-burning is to re-fertilise the land, but in Gilbert’s reimagining, the exercise is overladen with the spectacle of girls firing arrows, decorated with ribbons, into the gorse-bushes and the boys plunging in, looking to retrieve the ribbons and steal a kiss from their owners. Crab Skerry, though, desires the Gorse Mother herself, a kind of corn goddess, but in keeping with the wintertime as opposed to the spring, benevolent only up to a point:
“Pricked him all over she did,” Dally says, close to Crab’s ear, “before he got his turn with the pricking. She’s a mouth like a bowl of mulberries. All juicy. Swollen up fat from chewing on thorns. And she puts it on you and it’s like ten mouths all at once. You go in the gorse and if she gets you, you come out a man.” (Gilbert, Folk 8)
Crab, believing he has to be the bloodiest to earn the Gorse Mother’s desire, plunges deepest into the bushes and then finds it impossible to extricate himself once the contest is over and the fires have been lit. In his reverie, Crab thinks he is being consumed by the Gorse Mother: “Yellow fingers lick like flames. . . . Heat pours down through his groin, his thighs” (13). Crab’s death haunts the rest of the stories and serves as a constant warning to the islanders. Yet despite (or even because of) Crab’s sacrifice, the light and heat of the gorse-burning also illuminate the dark and cold at the darkest time of the year, suggesting the warmth and new life that is to come as the old year dies. Consequently, Gilbert’s worldbuilding articulates the cosmology through which the islanders understand one another, build their community, and relate their society to their environment.
21As Gilbert notes, citing Béla Bartók on the classical uses of what he terms “peasant music,” there are three ways in which folklore can be reimagined: used whole but embellished; used evocatively as a source of imitation and pastiche; and lastly, as an idiom in which the composer (or writer) creates something wholly new (Gilbert, “From Oracle Ox”). Just as Gilbert does not slavishly embellish or imitate Manx folklore, so she also cherry-picks from other British folklores. “The Neverness Ox-Men” is rooted in a legend from Trotternish, the northernmost peninsula of the Isle of Skye, in which family members “would stich themselves into an ox-hide and lurk behind a waterfall, to tell the fortunes of those brave enough” to enter (Gilbert, “From Oracle Ox”). While taking this idea seriously, Gilbert also plays with it: it becomes a secret ritual of the Oxley family as well as a patriarchal tradition, handed down from father to son and from elder brother to younger sibling, but it also complements other rituals on the island, such as the gorse race, becoming part of the cosmology that binds the community. Now that the tale is absorbed into the folklore of Neverness, Gilbert can play with it further: a girl, Gertrude Quirk, discovers the secret and bribes the younger Oxley, Hark, into letting her become the oracle. Unlike classical figures though, such as the priestess of Delphi, Gertrude specialises in terrifying predictions for the unwary: “Linnet Lundren’s hair will all fall out. Her teeth will turn black and the smell of her breath will turn to rotten eggs” (Gilbert, Folk 40). Whereas Hark merely hopes to “make the girlies reel and pinch their noses” (27), Gertrude brings to her storytelling expressiveness, specificity, and a sense of narrative: “And Drake Webbe won’t marry nobody for he’ll go so mad from diving deep that he’ll think he’s a real seal and he’ll get chewed up by a whale” (40). Whilst the girls on the other side of the waterfall “howl” and “shriek” (40), Gertrude’s storytelling brings her and Hark closer together. Not only does Gilbert transmute the original legend, absorbing it into the folklore of Neverness, but Gertrude’s intervention also develops the culture further, enhancing the art of storytelling on the island. The fact that Gertrude’s role remains invisible—a secret within a secret—reflects back upon real-world histories of women’s hidden creativity but it also emphasises the patriarchal structures in which the customs of Neverness operate.
22“Water Bull Bride,” as noted above, is the only narrative directly inspired by a Manx folktale, or rather, it embeds the story as a literal old wives’ tale. As Granny Win recounts: “The water bull . . . leaps inland with the sea surf on wild nights and swims up the river, sensing souls. Then he shakes off his bull-hide and hunts himself a maiden. The only way she can save herself is cross water” (69). This is what seems to happen to Win’s granddaughter, Plum, the experience of which leaves her “twisted” (72) and desperate to re-join her lover in “a wedding dress of waterweeds” (73). Despite Win’s attempts to bind her granddaughter, Plum escapes and tries to satisfy her desire with the local boys, Dally Oxley, Hark’s older brother, and Sandy Rincepan. Neither, though, can compensate for Plum’s lost lover until, in a mirror-image to the folktale, Plum is literally carried off by Trick, “a huge hulk of a man” (81), and presumably raped and murdered. Despite the apparent closeness of the community, there is no retribution: Trick is subsequently seen “in the ale room” with his brother Robin Prowd (138), a local farmer who gives employment to the landed poor, such as Plum’s best friend, Madden Lightfoot. Like the memory of Crab, whose death continues to torment Madden, causing her “to wander in her sleep” (102), Plum becomes a cautionary warning to other girls on the island. But there is no serious attempt to bring justice either for Plum or her grandmother: Trick simply refuses to admit his part in Plum’s disappearance (105).
23The sexual double-standard, which in the case of Plum and Trick is also intersected with economic inequalities, persists throughout Folk, forming a pattern that undermines any bucolic or homogeneous view of the community. In “Fishskin, Hareskin,” for example, Ervet retrieves the pelts of the three hares she had as a child, and which her father had killed on the day that Ervet’s new husband “carried her away” (20). These Ervet knits to form a fur covering for her new-born baby, an attempt not only to animalise her infant, rendering it both human and non-human, but to also recover her own primal connection with the non-human world before she became a disposable property in the exchange of human sexual relations. In “Sticks Are for Fire,” Gertrude and her sister Bryony learn not only about the persecution and death of Merry Mort, suspected of being a witch, but also of their mother’s subordination within the family. Bryony “peers up . . . just in time to see her ma’s head sent flicking to one side by the clout of [pa’s] fist”:
“That tale’s not for the ears of anyone living, least of all our own daughters.” He stands over Shilla, who stares at the ground. “Not for nobody, ever. You learn that lesson and you keep it, Shilla.” (66)
The taboo of shame binds the tongue of the community, that is, the mother tongue between parent and daughter. A disparity emerges between what Gilbert can do with the resources of folklore and what her characters can do with the same material in the strict parameters of island culture. Whereas Gilbert can go beyond embellishment or imitation to construct something wholly distinctive in the form of Neverness itself, her imagined storytellers can only repeat what has gone before. This is largely because of the limited social space for women. The Oxley men can act as oracles but Gertrude’s involvement has to be kept secret both from the rest of the family and the islanders. Granny Win, the local bard, rehearses the same stories and the same expressions over and over again; when Grey “put[s] her fingers in her ears” and decides to make “a story of her own” (43), her punishment is to be frozen to death by Jack Frost, thus freezing any attempt to publicly break from the oral tradition. The deaths of Grey, Plum, Crab and Merry are to be suppressed, by further bouts of male violence if need be, and not articulated as new narratives that might both heal the community and allow it to progress. What appears to be the united voice of the Folk, that shared body of unchanging folktales so beloved and idealised by middle-class folklorists, comes at the expense of subaltern voices, especially those of women, and the creation of new or varied tales based upon their own experiences. Gilbert’s use of the mosaic novel form is, in that sense, anti-Folk insofar as it dramatizes the construction of an official folk inheritance and achieves what the islanders, constrained by their own rituals of storytelling and festivity, cannot do: give voice to those dissident histories occluded within the folkloric process.
24Gilbert’s critique does not end there though. She ultimately portrays the community as melancholic and withdrawn, a resignation expressed by the now middle-aged Hark in the final piece, “Tether”: “Life’s here, such as it is” (214). The only character to leave the island is the itinerant sailor, Redwing, but even he follows a set routine: returning each winter, taking a new lover, and then leaving again in the spring. Redwing’s origin, destination, and source of income are unknown, but his apparent freedom is only provisional, since it relies upon his age, physical ability, and the sea-worthiness of his boat. He brings nothing from the outside world that might enhance or transform the community, whilst the patriarchal structures that guarantee and tolerate Redwing’s wanderings remain unaffected. By contrast, Madden—still tormented by the death of Crab—refuses a heteronormative closure by marrying Hark and desires instead the manner of Granny Win’s demise: lifted into the air by Guller’s kites until Guller cuts the tether. As Madden explains to Hark, “If you could choose endless joy, bliss that never, ever wore out, wouldn’t you?” (220). Despite the protestations of Hark, it is to this jouissance, this exquisite mix of pain and pleasure, that Madden turns. As Murnon the shepherd simply acknowledges, “She wanted her freedom” (230). A stark choice, then, is presented by Gilbert: a living death, defined by the insularity of the island, or liberty at the expense of one’s own corporeality. The “real folk culture” praised by Kingsnorth is instead pervaded by a necropolitics that all too resembles the cultural logic of the Capitalocene, especially as the effects of late capitalism are meted out most disadvantageously to proletarian and indigenous communities such as the one described in Folk.
25And yet, the community as a whole—if not individual members—endures. It is this endurance, despite any liberal humanist sentiment that could be ascribed to it, which renders both the islanders and Gilbert’s text opaque. Their way of life cannot be absorbed into the taxonomies set by middle-class commentators, whether that be notions of genre, cultural authenticity, or idealised versions of island communities. Instead, it follows an internal logic, distinct from pre-existing mythologies or real-world folk cultures, which is in turn an accomplishment of Gilbert’s worldbuilding. Although readers can parse the customs, rituals and traditions of the community, we can never truly know it from the inside-out. The singularity of Folk and its inhabitants is also attributable to the cyclical and elliptical design of the text, whether we term that a “short story cycle” or “mosaic novel,” which means that it remains—like Gertrude submerged in the ox-hide with Hark—a secret within a secret. This enigma, and the sensitivity that readers from outside such communities should bring to their investigation, is perhaps the most profound way in which we should approach Folk in terms of the UK’s recent island politics.