Review by Tracey Foster of "The Gallows Pole" by Benjamin Myers

Much has been written about the pros and cons of using slang in fiction. It's a difficult act to pull off, if your audience cannot understand or interpret the meaning behind the text. I had also heard about the strange phenomenon of how the brain can interpret written phrases even when the key vowels are removed, an exercise that is fun to do, but not something I would attempt to do in fiction. These doubts were in my mind as I started Myers's book The Gallows Pole. His protagonist and narrator speaks directly to us in Yorkshire dialect, written as heard and without punctuation. The first few words were hard to transcribe, but then it was like a lightbulb had gone on and I could suddenly, fluently read the strange words: "In the fyres of the forges in the Black Cuntry was where I first herd tell of coinin where I learnit a little bout chippin and clippin swimmers where I learnit bout the yeller trade and the work of them men that darest do."

Myers delves into the true history of the Cragg Vale Coiners, led by David Hartley, a notorious rebel who enlisted a gang of weavers and land workers to clip coins and defraud the Crown. An offence punishable by death, they worked in secret and avoided detection because of their remote settings in the Yorkshire hills. Using historical facts and court transcripts he weaves a narrative about a group that unleashes a reign of menace onto the local communities, who are caught up in their practices. The events that lead up to the capture and resultant hanging of the gang leaders is fast paced and gripping and involves a cat-and-mouse chase with an excise man and the law.

Dark and gritty, Myers's novel uses a wealth of guttural language to convey the destitution and desperation that led to the necessity for an illegal trade. Clipping real coins and shaving off small particles, they would melt down and repress the metal to create forgeries, passing them off in trade within the local communities: "The night came in like a bruise of purple and blues and then finally griped so tight that the sky was black and broken by the weight of time pressing upon it. Dawn would melt the night in fading yellows but for now the sun seemed like an impossibility; a dead concept. A foreign country."

Myers's skill for evoking place with pathos and descriptions of the dark vales led him to be awarded the Roger Deakin Prize in 2017 for writing about "natural history, landscape and environment." It also secured the Walter Scott prize in 2018, leading to a TV adaptation by the director Shane Meadows. Critics described the book as "a roaring furnace of a novel." The author's childhood in suburb of Durham was uneventful but allowed him the freedom to explore and, as he described, he "spent a lot of time climbing up trees or trespassing on roofs." This familiarity with nature seeps through the novel as his excise man roams the valleys in the dark, catching whispers from taverns and firelight from hidden forges. He keeps his narrative in tune with the earth, that eventually gives up its secrets: "Autumn arrived like a burning ghost ship on the landscape’s tide to set the land alight. The fires of the trees’ turning spread far across the flanks and the ravens took flight to the highest climes as leaves fell like flung bodies. September had long slipped away. It was a charred thing now. Gone."

Myers is no stranger to beautiful prose: his poetry collection Heathcliff Adrift from 2014 also used the moors to ground human emotions, allowing them to resonate with our earthy instincts:

To the sky

we ran
and fell
the heather our mattress
the worms our witness –

young lungs burning.
Wet-backed,
soil soaked
mulch-coddled, copper puddled.
Dirt giggled and dizzy.

Fists of earth
raised, thrown –
fecund confetti
for a future union.
The rustling of life.

Several passages of The Gallows Pole could also be read like poetry, finding a turn of phrase to turn the ear. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction but also relishes beautiful prose and is loath to sacrifice one to suit the other. Myers’s visceral novel pays due homage to the trope of dark novels from God’s own country. 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site  The Small Sublime found here.