Toward Mellbreak

Marie-Elsa Bragg's haunting novel

Marie-Elsa Bragg so brilliantly creates an archaic atmosphere in Towards Mellbreak that the reader is surprised to notice the late twentieth-century dates that mark each chapter and to encounter modern devices like automobiles and telephones. The West Cumbrian farm life of the novel so alien that it might have come from a different century or a different planet.

Bragg accomplishes this feat of defamiliarization partly by diction. The opening paragraph of the novel sets the rugged Hopkins-esque tone:

Ard was in its beginning; rock opening its winter cracks to splay sorrel, thistles bulbous and ready to bleed, new grass and nettles creaking under heavy boots. If Harold could feel the rumble of spring, it rose out of the fells today, almost a stampede in it, he thought. Bright morning lifting the green so high it was luminous.

It sounds like the beginning of a tale of Middle Earth.

Bragg also creates an antique world by peopling it with characters more in touch with centuries past than with the changing present. Her novel focuses on two decades (1971-1994) in the history of the Marras family, inhabitants of the fells of Mellbreak from time immemorial. Harold farms and shepherds with his friend Joe, and cares for his grandmother, Catherine. After a quiet courtship, he marries Esther Harrison and they have one son, Stephen. It’s an undramatic life of hard work, family, and battles with the elements.

But the outside world is intruding.