Award-winning Sheffield poet Helen Mort’s debut novel is a profound and affectionate tribute to the steel city

Thirty years on from the disaster that claimed 96 lives on April 15, 1989, multi-award-winning young poet Helen Mort, herself a native of the Steel City, makes her debut as a novelist with a book that deals empathetically and movingly with its ongoing legacy.

Black Car Burning, published by Chatto & Windus last month, is set in contemporary Sheffield where the lives of three young women – police community support officer Alexa, her climber girlfriend Caron and local shopworker Leigh – become romantically entangled. Meanwhile an ex-police officer struggles to come to terms with the traumatic incident that changed his life forever.

Running through the narrative as a significant strand is the theme of trust – in various different forms. Trust within personal, family and romantic relationships, among Sheffield’s climbing fraternity who, as Mort, herself a climber, says “literally place their lives in someone else’s hands” and between different communities – Alexa’s patch includes Page Hall where tensions are rising between white residents, the established Pakistani community and recently arrived Roma migrants from Slovakia.

Mort says that she always knew Hillsborough would figure in her story. “Growing up in and around Sheffield, it is such a huge cultural scar that everybody is so aware of.” At one point in the novel, Alexa, while out on patrol, confides to her older colleague Sue that she has bad dreams about Hillsborough, despite not having been there. “I just can’t stop having nightmares,” she says; to which Sue replies drily: “You and the rest of South Yorkshire, love.”

“It was a difficult thing to write about and I wanted to do it sensitively,” says Mort (for the record, she pulls it off, and brilliantly). She wrote the novel over a period of about six years and the idea came to her, as with many of her poems she says, while she was out running.

“I don’t think I ever really decided to write it as much as the characters decided for me. They started to talk to me, then I had a sense of a story I wanted to tell and I knew that it was a bigger scale than a poem allowed for and I needed a different canvas.”

Landscape (both urban and rural) features prominently in Mort’s work as a poet and in Black Car Burning – the name of a particularly challenging climbing route near Stanage Edge in the Peak District – she makes it into a character in its own right. Short poetic interludes pop up, written from the perspective of, and giving voice to, locations in and around Sheffield.

“Writing a novel is terrifying,” says Mort laughing. “It is a real feat of stamina and it felt much more risky than poetry.” It clearly hasn’t put her off though; she already has an idea for another, also set in her home city.

“I can’t stop writing about Sheffield,” she says. “It is an incredbily inspiring, diverse and accepting city. It is endlessly fascinating because it’s overloaded with so many rich stories.”

REVIEW

Black Car Burning 
by Helen Mort

Chatto & Windus, £12.99

Yvette Huddleston 4/5

As a poet, Helen Mort has proved several times over that she is a skilled and accomplished writer.

Her beautiful, lyrical poetry has deservedly won her many plaudits – and numerous awards. Now she has stepped into the arena of the longer form with her hugely impressive debut novel Black Car Burning. Set in present-day Sheffield, where Mort was born and still lives, it is a delicately wrought, complex narrative that snakes back into the past to the great tragedy that still haunts the city – Hillsborough. Mort’s characters range from those who are too young to really remember it to those who were directly involved and are struggling with their memories of it. Three young women are at the heart of the book – sensitive police community support officer Alexa, her feisty climber girlfriend Caron with whom she lives in a polyamorous relationship, and Leigh who works at a local outdoor shop with silent and troubled fiftysomething Pete.

The way in which Mort pulls together the threads of their intertwining lives, played out on the city’s streets and surrounding hills and crags as they face issues around trust, hurt, desire, loss and grief is poised and purposeful – like a climber navigating a tough ascent. She employs her poet’s eye for detailed observation to great effect, while her gift for storytelling comes shining through. A gritstone gem.