Unearthly and moody and promising and electric

Villager by Tom Cox

Apr 02, 2023

Tom Cox’s first novel is a mind-bending, psychedelic pageant-play, an unpredictable cavalcade that spans time from the early Bronze Age to the end of the 21st century. The inhabitants of the fictional Dartmoor village of Underhill come together in a study of place, nature, music and love, their episodic, interwoven lives linked by the creation of a 1968 folk rock album and presided over by the pangender, panoptic hill itself. Influenced by the mind-altering substance of life and the never-ending rain, soundtracked by the rushing river and the strains of RJ McKendree’s ‘Wallflower,’ Villager presents a kind of exotropic double vision, where everything you perceive as real has a juddery, wayward echo standing just to the side, ready to lead you astray as the Devon piskies will. But pay your dues, pay attention, and it will also lead you home.

Some days, he felt like he had been asked to write a book and had said no and given the money back, and instead chosen to write another book, finish it and abandon it in a ravine at night.
Tom Cox

My knowledge of folk rock is vanishingly slight, and I did experience a moment of concern when I realised that the entirely fictional McKendree and his ‘lost’ album were such a central catalyst to Villager’s plot. Yet I need not have worried. Cox is an assured and affectionate storyteller, with a unique style; one that invites the reader’s willing collaboration in his narrative adventure. The novel’s wild swimming, anecdotal qualities mean that McKendree is revealed from multiple perspectives, and these varying levels of intimacy result in a figure at once vivid yet elusive, one who steps into and out of the light at the turn of a page, but who is also a constant, the line upon which the story is pegged. It is by no means essential to listen to the life-imitating-art recording of ‘Wallflower’ that now exists, although I did hear it after I had finished reading. And whilst I am sure that many of the story’s nuanced musical references passed me by (unlike the slyly-loving homage to Postgate & Firmin’s Smallfilms, which did not), my enjoyment of the novel was not affected by that in any way.

Villager is infinitely mood-enhancing. Open it at any page and a random phrase rings true. Cox can always make me both laugh out loud and want to read aloud (convulsively, obsessively) to anyone who’ll listen. Acts of narrative legerdemain gave me little electric jolts of joy — and the pricking of tears at the back of my eyes — as I grasped the magic trick being performed and its significance in the greater arc of Cox’s story. But Villager is a book to take seriously, too. Cox tackles themes of ecocide and resilience, exile and belonging; juxtaposes the permanence of igneous granite and an ancient spirit presence with the fleeting nature of humanity and the casual, unthinking harm of the Anthropocene; commingles fact and superstition, legends and the legendary; and does it all with the lithe literary athleticism that is so familiar from his previous non-fiction and short stories.

The Dartmoor of Tom Cox’s imagination is a wild, wet and hairy place; a lover who’ll give you the best time of your life and just as probably leave you penniless and shoeless beside a lonely road.

It’s an encounter you won’t forget.