Beastings by Benjamin Myers review – austere and brilliantly shocking

Benjamin Myers was the winner of the 2013 Northern Writers' award, though it is worth noting that he only became a "northern writer" by default. Born in Durham, Myers headed south to spend 15 years as a music journalist, writing a novel about the Manic Street Preachers' Richey Edwards and co-founding a punk literary movement, Brutalism, when mainstream publishers wouldn't touch him.

Having moved to rural Yorkshire and struck up a relationship with the independent publishers Bluemoose, however, Myers seems to have reconnected with his natural voice. In 2012 he produced Pig Iron, a startlingly violent account of a young traveller on a Wearside estate, which was runner-up in the Guardian's Not the Booker prize and won the inaugural Gordon Burn prize. The follow-up turns out to be even more uncompromising, as Myers fashions a climax so gruesome it leaves you feeling a little light-headed.

Beastings describes a desperate chase across the wildest parts of Cumbria in prose as primal and denuded as the fells themselves. It is so austere that the characters do not even have names: the main protagonist, referred to solely as the Girl, is a mute brought up in an orphanage who abducts a baby from her employer and absconds into the wild. She is pursued by a sadistic cleric known only as the Priest, who enlists the aid of a one-legged Poacher in a hunt that becomes as monomaniacal as Ahab's obsession with the whale.

Though there is much about the Girl's past experience that remains enigmatic, Myers distils her life in a religious institution into a single sentence: "Her existence at St Mary's came to be defined by a few stock symbols – soap and scars and slopping out; buckets and bruises and the Book." Unable to speak, she is dependent on the charity of strangers, such as a Shakespeare-quoting woodsman who lives in a cave and a taciturn dairy farmer who gives the starving infant the cream of his herd: "The beastings … the mother's first milk for the newborn. The best bit. Tit-fresh."

Myers' evocation of landscape is intimate and elemental, though it is not immediately apparent when the action is set. When the girl passes a town possessing "a Co-operative, chemists and new theatre", one initially visualises the mint-green hoarding of a 7-Eleven such as might have appeared in Pig Iron. Yet the Girl's astonishment at the wonder of bottled gas makes it clear that she has never encountered a Primus stove before, while the Priest and Poacher engage in an argument about Darwinism that indicates that the author of On the Origin of Species is still alive.

You could quibble with these dates, given that Darwin died in 1882, 10 years before the Primus was invented. Whether Pig Iron and its follow-up are set weeks or centuries apart, however, is ultimately immaterial, as both are clearly products of the same distinct sensibility. The Girl's motive for absconding with the child is made plain on page one: "She saw a life that was already set in place just as hers was set from day one." If the child – or indeed the Girl – could talk, they might express themselves in words like those of Pig Iron's Maria, a young woman trapped on a Durham estate whose life seems hopelessly preordained: "It's like it's all you know, and mebbes all you're ever gonna know, and there's nee escape from it or the people you hang round with or live next door to or find yourself related to."

The drawback is that, since the Girl is mute, Myers must do all her thinking and feeling for her, delivering the narrative in waves of attritional, Authorised Version cadences that darken like accumulating thunderclouds. One misses the slightly warped first-person observations of John-John the traveller, which gave Pig Iron its bleak, offbeat sense of humour. Beastings, in contrast, seems to be peopled with archetypes rather than characters. But it is worth persevering for the shock of the ending, which is both purgative and abhorrent in a manner that suggests that Myers has the potential to become a true tragedian of the fells.