“Tragedy is a matter of opinion and tone.” This is what “the kid” thinks as he watches a woman drag herself from a pit filled with reeking animal corpses, into which she was thrown the previous night by her husband, sister and neighbours, having been beaten, raped, then left for dead under the great dome sky of the American West. Earlier, as these terrible things are being done to the woman – Ginny, the protagonist of Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast – the narrative appears to prove the kid’s point. He recounts the rape in dialogue, watching on from some distance, emotional as well as physical: “‘She’s got a rock,’ the kid said. ‘She’s smashed him with it.’ … ‘The rock is his now. Now he’s flung the rock off. Now he’s choking her.’ … ‘She’s sleeping now, some such’”. The kid’s detachment is one component of McLean’s wider project in this carnival of a novel, which seeks to present – and conceal – tragedy in a farrago of competing styles and registers.

McLean’s primary narrative thread is a conventional chase plot. We are in an indeterminate present day – a Wild West that also features mobile phones and aeroplanes – and Ginny has fled on horseback into the Mormora Mountains (McLean’s locations are all fictitious). Ginny’s murderous sister, guilt-ridden husband and a band of men are on the hunt to finish off the job they have started. Also roaming the wild plains are a “Deputy” and the kid, each in pursuit of Ginny for different reasons. The narrative then starts to splinter. There are postmodern fragments of postcards sent by the Deputy (“‘Howdy’ Mom – nine months. Sorry about no Adios – Wish you were here though you’d hate it – Can’t believe the stars/air –”); stretches dedicated to a television serial taking place inside the kid’s head, as if presented by a talkshow host (“if you’re only now tuning in, you’d best saddle up and hold on tight”); diary entries written by a string of mules (we also meet talking steers and horses), who desire freedom from their human oppressors; and, finally, brief interludes set in 2179, when the American West is just the “West Sea” and most of humanity has been wiped out by climate change. Some of these strands are brilliant in their weirdness (the mules; the postcards); others fall flat (the TV serial; the sci-fi element, which feels underdeveloped).

One explanation for McLean’s choice of such disparate modes is that she requires a disorientating, playful amalgam of styles to accommodate the unrelenting atrocities being carried out, both against her protagonist and the wider cast of characters, man and beast alike. Form mirrors content, the endless destruction demanding an equivalent stylistic volatility. Another explanation might lie in an essay by the Princeton academic Lee Clark Mitchell on “The Humanizing violence of style in Blood Meridian” (2015). Cormac McCarthy’s novel of 1985 is a clear influence on Pity the Beast, and similarly explores brutality in the American West, primarily through the character of a kid with “a taste for mindless violence”. In his essay, Clark Mitchell challenges the critical consensus that there exists a “schism” between the visionary quality of McCarthy’s language and the banal way in which violence is treated throughout the novel. Instead, he finds that the “rhythmic displacements confirm paradoxically the prospect of seeing anew, the very basis for ethical and aesthetic discernment”. The language becomes the vehicle for a redemption that the plot cannot offer.

Pity the Beast occasionally reaches a McCarthyian pitch of incantatory power. Mountains are purest action”, one character declares. “True, they are a visible, solid surface, but they’re also proof of faults intersecting far below, reflecting only the smallest hint of the tumult, the titanic subsurface battles that dwarf any human action, idea, existence.” At times, however, Mclean’s style falters. Late in the novel, when the kid throws a petrol-soaked blanket over Ginny’s horse, the blanket instantly catches fire, and the horse “bucked and banged, burning brighter across his back, his hood, a horse scream”. The plosives here feel forced, serving only to distract us from the horror of what is happening. More subtle and interesting is what takes place immediately afterwards. Ginny hears the boy weeping in the woods, and the conditions are made for a different kind of redemption. Robin McLean could have ended her novel here, with the kid’s dawning awareness of his immense potential for cruelty. Instead, she forces the issue, returning us to the science-fiction strand, where men are beginning to learn anew how to live on Earth without destroying it and each other.

Lamorna Ash is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish fishing town, 2020

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