Book review: In the Blood by Jenny Newman

Mike Parker

Though set in Wales for only its first chapter, Welshness seeps through this extraordinary novel like rainwater from a leaking roof. And there’s a lot of leaking within these pages, for it is 1945, the war has just ended, and everything is rusty and knackered, saggy and creaking. You can practically smell the rot.

Young Jackie spent the war as an evacuee on a north Wales farm, running wild with the hounds. She is not best pleased when a woman, “tittuped in pink high heels”, appears in the yard, claims to be her mother and spirits her off to a crumbling manor in Cumbria to live in service.

Gloomy

The “gloomy old box of a house” is in flux. War has killed and crippled many of its denizens, but it has also blown off lids of class, status and sex. No-one knows quite where the pieces will land.

The portrait of this very specific moment in time is utterly fascinating, beautifully realised and worth the price of admission alone. Her cast of characters never boils over into stereotype. Though the landowner curses the new Attlee government that has “taxed us to extinction”, he knows that he cannot fight on alone, and eventually has to call in the National Trust.

The battered and bruised old house, wracked with dark corners and even darker secrets, is patched up for the public, for whom “it basked in autumn sunlight like a pampered cat, bland and neutered, pleased to be admired”.

Gusto

Newman handles her material with gusto, grace and a vivid sensory pallete. A servants’ passage in the house, as seen through the eyes of twelve-year-old Jackie: “Long as a village street, it stretched ahead, its cabbage-coloured walls sucking light from the bulbs on the ceiling.” On opening her bedroom window, “The night air soothed my skin like friendly paws. Ears out, I caught the gossipy splash of the stream, the snort of the Reverend’s cob from his shed…”. On looking for a lost boy, “I caught a whiff of woollen socks, leather soles and fright.” Jackie’s instincts are on permanent red alert, and so are ours.

Wild and Welsh

In the Blood would succeed even if that were all there was to it. But we have something wilder and much Welsher here too, for Jackie’s time as an evacuee, running with the hunt and even bedding down in the kennels, has made her more hound than child.

Guided by the spirit of Gwyn ap Nudd, the Welsh god of the wild hunt and the tylwyth teg, she is inured in the codes of instinctive and respectful animal husbandry, and distraught on seeing them flouted by the hunt in England.

The contest between the Welshness of her heart and the Englishness of her circumstance is a constant leitmotif of In the Blood. In lesser hands, it could tip easily into pastiche. Not here. With her lightness of touch, Newman shows rather than tells, and trusts us to make the connections. And she does it so exquisitely, such as when Jackie is briefly reacquainted with the old Welsh farmer with whom she was billeted in the war: “Before I knew it, I was speaking Welsh, the warm and friendly words rolling off my tongue, words from long ago, covered in hide and fur.”

This is elemental stuff. You can sense Jenny Newman digging deep to haul her thoughts and observations to the surface, where they are sifted and polished for our consumption. In that regard, In the Blood is a stubbornly old-fashioned novel, crafted with great care and vixen cunning.

Published by a tiny independent press, it would never get past a commissioning editor at a major publisher these days, and that is a crying shame.

Dazzling effect

Even its primary subject matter – fox-hunting – would instantly condemn it to the slush pile. Quite how central the hunt is to our culture and countryside is something we rarely consider; Newman gently asks us to do just that, and to such dazzling and absorbing effect. Again, she shows, not tells.

The novel left me unsure as to which side of the hunting debate she lies; only in the acknowledgements at the end do we find out, for any proceeds from the book are going to two anti-hunt charities. It takes a mountain of maturity to be so restrained.

In its evocation of a deep, distant countryside that’s home to all of the human complexities of a big city, as well as the most primal of pagan forces, In the Blood is a worthy successor to the works of Mary Webb, Alan Garner or Kate Roberts. It is a gripping and glorious read.

In the Blood by Jenny Newman is published by Psychology News Press. It is available from all good bookshops.