{"id":7296,"date":"2017-12-06T05:22:54","date_gmt":"2017-12-06T05:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7296"},"modified":"2017-12-11T11:52:17","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T11:52:17","slug":"towards-mellbreak-by-marie-elsa-bragg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7296","title":{"rendered":"Towards Mellbreak by Marie-Elsa Bragg"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Chatto & Windus 6 April 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

224pp, hardback, \u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The poisoning of British hill-farmers in the late twentieth century may have been less deliberate than the poisoning by nerve gas of young soldiers on the battlefields of the First World War but the means were identical:\u00a0 neurologically destructive organophosphates, used for sheep-dipping.\u00a0 In Marie-Elsa Bragg\u2019s quietly devastating first novel, the link is made indelible.\u00a0 You have only to look at the family tree to see the cutting down of the earlier generation; one of Bragg\u2019s themes is the pointless suffering of those who followed.<\/p>\n

Her story opens on the North Western fells of Cumbria, in the spring of 1971.\u00a0 Harold and his uncle Joe run the family farm at Ard, with domestic support from Harold\u2019s grandmother, Catherine.\u00a0 Rooted in their landscape, these three face the painful loss of traditional ways of farming.\u00a0 Rules and registers, supervised by officials from the Ministry, disturb old patterns of life on the fells.\u00a0 Everything is contested:\u00a0 how the land is drained and divided, how the cows are milked, how the sheep are dipped\u2026<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Harold\u2019s knowledge of his land and flocks; his family\u2019s loyalty to the dear departed; their acceptance of hardship; their attention both to the passage of the seasons and to the yearly rituals of the church\u00a0 –\u00a0 all these continue on familiar tracks, accommodating bereavement, courtship, childbirth and the whole of family life as naturally as day follows day.<\/p>\n

Then illness strikes Harold, seemingly out of the blue.\u00a0 He is afflicted by fever, chills, the shakes, a blistering rash.\u00a0 He begins to lose the use of one eye.\u00a0 In his weakness, he feels that he has failed his father.\u00a0 Joe, too has become bitterly depressed.\u00a0 It is left for young Stephen, Harold\u2019s son, and his thoughtful mother Esther, to look to the future.<\/p>\n

Towards Mellbreak<\/em> is suffused with love for these people and their place.\u00a0 You see and feel the rain \u2018lathered onto the fells, clinging to the clouds like froth\u2019, the snowdrops \u2018spread across the lawn, as if a stream had come through\u2019, the mourners crammed into the farm kitchen \u2018like a bucket of coals\u2019.\u00a0 It is such an intimate portrait that you don\u2019t want to leave them.\u00a0 However, it is also the story of an avoidable tragedy.<\/p>\n

Organophosphate pesticides (OPs) were in use from the 1950s, but not labelled as \u2018deadly poison\u2019 until the 1990s, from which point farmers were required to wear protective clothing.\u00a0 In 2002, the World Health Organization identified OPs as \u2018the most common cause of severe acute pesticide poisonings, some of which have resulted in deaths\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

* A 2017 Notable Book<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Towards Mellbreak<\/em> is suffused with love for these people and their place. You see and feel the rain \u2018lathered onto the fells, clinging to the clouds like froth\u2019, the snowdrops \u2018spread across the lawn, as if a stream had come through\u2019, the mourners crammed into the farm kitchen \u2018like a bucket of coals\u2019. It is such an intimate portrait that you don\u2019t want to leave them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7296"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7693,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7296\/revisions\/7693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}