THE BORROWED HILLS, by Scott Preston
Scott Preston’s debut novel, “The Borrowed Hills,” begins in the north of England during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, when several million British farm animals were slaughtered to contain the deadly virus. Steve Elliman, a truck driver, has returned to his father’s sheep farm in the hilly, rainy, boulder-strewn region of Cumbria, also known as the fells. The Ellimans are tenant farmers, unlike their more successful neighbor, William Herne, who owns the land on which he grazes his much larger flock.
As foot-and-mouth spreads, both farms face the same fate: In an arrestingly grim and gory sequence early in the book, the police — “squaddies” — show up to ensure the extermination of every last sheep. “Rifle muzzles placed between their ears and the bullets lined along their backs, so each bang stayed inside their heads,” Preston writes.
Afterward, Steve returns to the road for several years until the death of his father brings him back to the fells. With his family’s tenancy dissolved, he winds up on the Herne farm, assisting his onetime competitor in the grueling maintenance of his new flock in exchange for room and board.
A fugitive splinter of resentment worries Steve’s heart; the foot-and-mouth outbreak originated on the Herne farm, and Steve believes that William owes him something. How much is an open question. On top of that, William is married to Helen, who was Steve’s adolescent crush. Then there is the Hernes’ teenage son, Danny, spooked to the margins of the homestead by Steve’s arrival.
The first third of “The Borrowed Hills” unfolds with a pleasurable, slow-burn assurance. An Oedipally inflected saga of intergenerational retribution seems to be unfolding, bound by the slipknot logic of Greek tragedy: The closer Steve gets to what he wants, the closer he is to destroying it. The more William tries to evade his fate, the larger it looms.
Then Preston changes focus and genre. The middle section of the book is taken over by Colin Tinley, a vicious poacher and freelance criminal who moves his crew of cartoonishly one-dimensional henchmen onto the Herne farm. Preston struggles to convince the reader that a man as shrewd and wary of “offcomers,” or outsiders, as Herne would fall so precipitously under the sway of the violent, unpredictable and manifestly untrustworthy Colin. But he does, dragging Steve with him into Colin’s bloody scheming.
What follows is an antic procession of action-movie clichés: Murder threats are made at the drop of a hat, robberies go wrong and policemen are executed. There are chases across the fells and armed standoffs. On multiple occasions, a villain pauses while on the verge of delivering the killing blow to gloatingly declaim his imminent victory, only to be foiled at the last possible instant.
Once the Tinley plot reaches its blood-soaked conclusion, the novel gets back on track, returning to the original cast in its elegiac final third.
“I used to think you were different from William,” Helen tells Steve. This could never be true, and Preston skillfully depicts how each man has come to hate what, in another life, he might have loved about the other: Steve a brooding but more capable son to William than is Danny, William a stronger and, in his own enigmatic way, more dedicated father to Steve than the late Elliman senior. The novel comes satisfyingly full circle at its close, extending into a final intergenerational usurpation.
“Our retirement is death,” Steve says. He’s talking about shepherds, but also the sheep they drive implacably over the desolate Cumbrian hills. “The Borrowed Hills” is at its most resonant and powerful when the human drama does not overwhelm, but takes its proper place in the pitiless and timeless landscape on which all of nature’s tenants — man and animal alike — live and die.
THE BORROWED HILLS | By Scott Preston | Scribner | 289 pp. | $28
