FRAY

Chris Carse Wilson

(Harper North, £14.99)

Apparently written in 20-minute bursts on the bus to his job as Communications Manager of V&A Dundee, and hidden from his wife until it was completed, Chris Carse Wilson’s debut novel is an intense study of grief and obsession, following two people who try to come to terms with bereavement by pushing themselves mentally and physically to their limits.

After the death of their mother, and some harsh words after her funeral, the father of the protagonist (whose name and gender is unspecified) has disappeared. After a few months, they track him down to his hiding place, a neglected cottage in the middle of a forest in the Scottish Highlands. But Dad is already gone, leaving behind reams and reams of paper covered in writing.

The disjointed notes he has left behind express his belief that his wife isn’t dead, but is actually somewhere nearby and being concealed from him by the Devil. Having scoured every inch of the area, he is convinced that the evil one is thwarting all his attempts to recover her.

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Gradually becoming resigned to the thought that their father is, by now, probably lying dead at the foot of a ravine – or even, as his writings claim, “here ... but hidden”, like his wife – our protagonist takes extended leave from work, spending hours every day at the cottage poring over the writings for clues and taking long hikes to become as familiar with the landscape as with Dad’s words – for “Neither means anything without the other.”

Bereft at the loss of both parents, lacking “that reassuring ability to look to another to resolve some restlessness in yourself, to calm and compose”, the child begins a journal of their own, to be closer to their father, but only succeeds in following his downward spiral of obsession.

Their world contracts to the cottage and its surrounding mountains, glens and forests, and in Wilson’s hands the isolation is palpable and unremitting. It’s ironic that one can feel such claustrophobia in a novel dominated by the perilous grandeur of the great outdoors; but there are no secondary characters to break the spell, no respite from these compulsive trains of thought. Soon the protagonist is showing signs of mental exhaustion, tormented by their failings: their goal-orientated life, fear of failure, the unsought advice that has driven people away and soured relationships.

It’s often said of landscapes and buildings in literature that they’re characters in their own right, but that feels more true of the imposing Highland vista in Fray than most. Filtered through the perceptions of our central characters, it manages to be both loftily indifferent to human concerns and a mutable, malevolent trickster at one and the same time. Dad’s jottings warn never to trust the beauty of the landscape, or to be swayed by the play of light and shade on the mountains.

To him, all surfaces appearances are a trick, a distraction from his mission to find his wife. He may have had a point: there are some inexplicable occurrences, and a third voice entering the narrative, which, depending on your point of view, cast doubt on the reliability of the narrator or suggest that there really are uncanny forces at work in this wilderness.

Foregrounding atmosphere and psychological suspense for most of its length, Fray is a literary novel that probes the most sensitive recesses of its characters’ minds in a build-up to a charged and hallucinatory final act. An eerie and immersive depiction of the difficult process of grieving, it marks the emergence of a powerful new writer.

 

ALASTAIR MABBOTT