Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > Dead Lands

This had always been hunting country, a land of men descended from men who came from other men who had been born here from time immemorial. No one knew who had laid the first stone. A thousand legends were told, and these found their way into children's fables and the afternoon chatter of women's sewing circles, but none were compelling enough to last. For me it had always been a poor man's land.

This novel is one of the first published by a new Dundee based small press 3 Times Rebel who “translate female authors who write in minority languages …. Only women. Only minority languages. This is our choice” and who take their name from an excellent quote by a Catalan poet (Maria-Merce Marçal)

I am grateful to fate for three gifts: to have been born a woman, from the working class and an oppressed nation. And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel.

It was originally written in Catalan by author Núria Bendicho whose world-weary writing is inspired by among others William Faulkner (she has said “I had found my natural interests: poverty, illness, exploitation, the condition of women, the question of evil.”) and is in its maturity in contrast to her age (born in 1995). It was translated (in a way which to me reads very naturally in English-English other than a double use of the, to me obscure if correct, term Passel) by the mother-daughter translation team of Martha Tennant and Muraxa Relano.

The set-up of the novel is a family living in a farm in the Catalan countryside (some way outside a village which itself is remote) – the time of the novel is not specified (and there is a sense of timelessness about it) but I imagined it as the turn of the last Century. The central family consists of Father Juame, Mother Anna and five children ranging from 30 something to 15 (Tomas, Pere, Jon, Maria and the physically handicapped Boy) and Maria’s illegitimate child Marieta and other key protagonists are the Priest, the local mayor’s daughter Anna, Dolors who runs the local whorehouse and her idiot Son Esteve.

At the book’s opening Boy describes the death of Jon – who after having left home without explanation for 3 years, returns only to be shot in the back. The family arrange a hasty and bodged burial with the Priest and Esteve in attendance and the murder uncovers further secrets at the heart of the family and community including incest, sexual abuse, domestic violence and another murder (whose aftermath is well known to the community and lead to Juame and Anna’s marriage).

As Pere says later “though I wanted to believe [the murdered] could have be an outsider, the family's clumsy attempts to cover it up quickly and move on, no questions asked, only served to corroborate the fact that they, too, had been deceiving themselves their whole lives. The evil I’d struggled to contain, to keep from spilling out into the world, was worse than I thought.”

These revelations (and the truth behind Jon’s death) emerge over 12 intense chapters told by the characters listed above (including Jon after his death) and a final chapter by a carer who looks after the murderer later in their life in a sordid Barcelona care home.

3.5* rounded up – if too uniformly dark in both tone and content for my tastes this is an impressive piece of writing.

That's when I realised it was all a game of chess. A game with too many checkmates for one board, and maybe too many pawns, with an enraged queen aiming to topple a king that fate had already forgiven and probably sent to purgatory.