Mothtown by Caroline Hardaker

(Angry Robot, 2023)

Reviewed by Niall Harrison

It begins After. The narrator of Mothtown, David Porter, is “a human knot”, falling. He hits his head, lies in the earth awhile, then forces himself upwards. He is looking for “the two shadows”, but they seem to be hiding. He’s running, sliding, scrabbling down a craggy valley that is “coated in dead brown grass like hair on a giant”. The sky is “a dirty chalkboard”. It’s quiet. Michale had told him it hadn’t been that kind of town for thousands of years, but David is still amazed by its emptiness, “its naked hills burning beneath the stars.” And it shouldn’t have taken this long to reach the door. But perhaps—he hopes—he can still get there before the shadows catch him.

And from there, in media res, we are yanked back Before, where David is telling his story to an unknown interlocutor, and struggling with short-term memory loss. (“Why is there so much broken glass on the floor?” he asks. No answer is forthcoming.) Every so often there are more flashes of After, in which David continues to struggle through Mothtown towards somewhere or something, an epiphany or a transformation; the suspicion has to be that Before is actually taking place after After, and that David has been caught and is being interrogated, perhaps by the shadows. But chronology is hardly the only thing that is not clear. Like Caroline Hardaker’s first novel, Composite Creatures (2021), Mothtown is an unsettled, oblique book; much is relegated to the corner of the eye, or described in ambiguous terms that nevertheless seem desperately freighted with significance. I thought occasionally of writers like Nina Allan (Hardaker is earthier), Aliya Whiteley (Hardaker has less ooze), and M. John Harrison (Hardaker is not yet as steely, but then, who is).

The opacity is exacerbated by the fact that, for the first half of the novel, the Before narration is recalling events from David’s childhood that he clearly didn’t fully understand at the time they were happening. He watches homeless people trudging up the road outside his normal house in a normal town (that appears to be, like Hardaker herself, somewhere in the North-East of England), and he calls them mudmen, “like boulders come alive”, and he is sure they are on a pilgrimage to somewhere. The great trauma of his childhood—which for a while seems as though it could be the line between Before and After, but it’s not—is the loss of his grandfather. Francis Porter was a professor working on dark matter and quantum mechanics; being in his office after school, gazing at the esoteric apparatus and mirrors, is for David like “being inside Grandad’s head”, and it was wonderful because “everything had a story, a place.” One day David overhears a conversation between Francis and a colleague, the latter insisting, “You can’t use University resources for this. It’s not right.” Francis tells David not to worry: he says the colleague just isn’t ready, that he’s “stuck in old ways […] not like us.” David feels initiated.

So when Francis disappears, and David’s parents insist that he has died following illness, David is not inclined to believe them, even after there has been a funeral. Much as some of the authors mentioned earlier have sometimes been known to do, Hardaker manoeuvres her readers into fearing that David, the protagonist in a genre novel, is wrong to believe that there is more to the world than others will admit. The greatest evidence in his favour is that there is definitely something actually askew about the version of England that David is living in, and perhaps the wider world. The timeline is unclear, but David’s life appears to be contemporaneous with ours, not the future or the past, but some people really are disappearing. Charity workers dressed in blue take collections at the supermarket “to support survivors of the Modern Problem”, which might be a kind of extreme alienation, or an escape that society doesn’t want you to know about. There are marches and rallies reported on the news. David’s parents are worried that he might be affected, and take him to see a specialist: they are given some leaflets and told to come back in six months if they are still concerned. David himself is sure there is a connection with his grandfather’s research; perhaps those affected were born in the wrong world. He is also increasingly sure that the mudmen are involved; perhaps they are searching for a way home. But the underlying situation is never described directly, not even when David is older, because he assumes it is already fully understood by his audience, which it is, remembering that his audience is not us.

In all this there is no clear allegory to be decoded, but Mothtown is nevertheless steeped in the politics of the moment. Like Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, it is a withering book. It doesn’t all work; Mothtown is probably slightly too long, and every so often, deft obliqueness becomes over-elaborated murk. But it looks with a harrowing steadiness at the despair and pain of an atomised society and how they are over-medicalised yet under-treated; it cries out from within a failing system where the root causes of failure are never acknowledged. It’s hard to follow David as he picks away at the facts of his life to try to work out how they fit together; like her protagonist, Hardaker is reaching for something with this story, and like her protagonist, readers can only expect a difficult peace After.

Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.