In the first chapter the narrator (a sheep farmer) carefully helps with the birth of a lamb who's presenting backwards. It's late. He doesn't want to disturb his wife in bed. On p.21 we learn she's been dead 3 weeks - a horse kick to the head. The doctor who'd known them both since childhood didn't want to tell him she was pregnant.
He has to force-feed the weakest lamb. His mother visits and fusses. She used to live there. 'I have to get through this,' he said. 'It's easier if I don't see anyone. I have to just get through. It doesn't matter how I am.'. His father is a post-stroke invalid.
There's a flashback to when he was a boy. He and his father helped the big man catch a badger alive by digging up a sett. From the big man's PoV we see that he sold the badger for £500 to a group of men with dogs. He attended the savage event. We see it through his eyes. Dogs symbolise instinct, blood-lust, mobs.
The narrator's still grieving. "He had realised that morning that there was no more toilet paper and could hardly believe that this would be the thing to drive him out". He drives to the beach, sees old couples. He buys the toilet paper at a garage, drives home. He visits her grave - so close that on the eve of her burial he heard the grave-diggers. The big man sees him, realises he's weak, vulnerable and thinks he'd be useful as a helper.
The big man and some men are digging again, within earshot of Daniel. Daniel leaves the house and (maybe) is knocked out with a spade.
When the big man is home, asleep, the police raid, their dogs rushing through the tunnels of his house.
The prose is poetic, in a good way, though it's unrealistic to have farmers (or anyone) having so many interesting thoughts. The shard episodes don't work for me.
- sees a head of barleycorn, vertebral and dessicated amongst the straw like a skeleton in a bird pellet (p.11)
- He had a sudden strange sense of time - not as a thing you live within, but as an element you grow alien to when you become aware of it, the way you lose the sense of your body being yours when you look too long in a mirror (p.15)
- there were gapes of sunshine through the fast-shifting clouds, but they came and went like laughter provoked in a crying child (p.27)
- Somehow time had gone too fast. It just goes to fast, he said within himself (p.31 - I don't like "within")
- Like the momentary surprise of picking up an empty box you thought was full of weight (p.117 - "full of weight" sounds arty)
- he jogged over to the bird and picked it up. It felt immediately thin and light, like an old person's hand (p.127)
Other reviews
- Patrick Barkham (The Dig turns the reader into a helpless animal; transfixed, waiting for that blow to the skull. ... Daniel's struggle succinctly reveals the crisis in modern farming and the suffering endured by young people still trying to make a living from the land)
- Evie Wyld (We move between two strands — one the unnamed badger baiter known as “the big man” and the other, Daniel, a Welsh farmer grieving for his recently dead wife and trying to keep her memory alive as well as their lambs. Thus the novel becomes a kind of diptych about violence, loss and the different ways one can be trapped.)
- Geoffrey Bendeck (But apart from the tragic plot and gothic themes it must be remarked on that Jones, like great poet-novelists, fills his book with beautiful sentences. “A singular moth flutters in through the wind baffles to the naked bulb above the kettle, cuspid, a drifting piece of loose ash on the white filament, paper burnt up, caught in the rising current from some fire unseen, unfelt.” ... The final pivotal scene, taking place over just a few paragraphs, could have been much longer, much slower. ... At several points Jones also seems to hint, and miss, opportunities for exposition on larger societal themes. )
- goodreads
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