Finish the last page of Ross Raisin's God's Own Country, shut the book and stick it away on the shelf. Marsdyke will still follow you around the room in which you've just been reading, like a portrait with staring eyes.

John Braine's Lampton, Stan Barstow's Brown and David Storey's mud-splattered Machin shared common traits: hot ambition, a cold canny eye for the main chance and a high self-regard that soon curdles into swaggering arrogance and conceit. Marsdyke is far worse than any of them.

His malevolent moods, his irrational, spitting hatred for the neighbours in the North Yorkshire valley where his father farms, and nearly everyone who lives outside it too, makes him angry, resentful and bellicose. He's a fully loaded four-bore waiting to go off: a psychotic who rips the heads off chickens, a specialist in lies and evasions, which he does freely and without remorse, and a crude manipulator prepared to beat to pulp anyone he can't subjugate. Marsdyke is crooked timber; there isn't a straight bone in his 19 year-old body.

In fact, virtue is hard to find in God's Own Country. Raisin's book is choked with figures that you'd hail a taxi to avoid: Marsdyke's ignorant parents, who deal with their son's boiling resentments with either silence or brutality; the Reeves, who are affluent in-comers insensitive to the customs of the countryside; their stroppy 15 year-old daughter Josephine, who is hopelessly naïve and pampered; and the bovine Marsdyke, who isn't to be trusted as the narrator. Whatever he says in defence of himself is always an untruth. The one likeable thing with legs in the entire book is Sal, Marsdyke's devoted dog.

Raisin writes in Yorkshire dialect (a glossary might have been handy for those unfortunate enough not to live here) and so the text is heavy with "lugger-buggers", "barmpots" and "blatherskites". Marsdyke chastises himself for being a "gawby"; he takes a "gleg" at Josephine and "tantled behind" her; he talks about the "looks on your fizzgogs", the "scran" that Josphine takes into the woods; his own "nazzardly" brain; and the "towns" – the pink and green hatted ramblers. Marsdyke hides behind walls to stone them with rocks the size of cricket balls. He despises the ramblers' biscuit tin image of farming, and demolishes it in brilliant passages, such as this one on shearing sheep. "It's not all fluffy lambs in blankets sucking milk from the bottle in front
of the fire, such as they think – it's being a veterinary, a dentist, a knacker, mending ruptures and rotted teeth, cutting
dags of shite off their backsides where it clumps in the wool".

Raisin fashions a plot in which Marsdyke and Josephine abscond together across
North Yorkshire and towards the coast.

This emphatically isn't a Tyke version of Romeo and Juliet. The relationship begins as the rebellious attraction of opposites, passes briefly into dependency and then develops darkly. It's a reflex action to say that Marsdyke is reminiscent of a rural Holden Caulfield, the heath and moorland replacing Central Park. God's Own Country, however, reminded
me much more of the second half of John Fowles's The Collector, given the sinister possessiveness at the core of that novel.

I doubt that we're rid of Marsdyke. Rather, in the same way that Alan Sillitoe caught up 30 years on with an elderly Arthur Seaton in Birthday – his sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – there's
scope for Raisin to write
about Marsdyke in brooding middle-age.

If so, I bet he'll follow you around the room all over again.


Ross Raisin
Viking £14.99