The Green Man of Eshwood Hall by Jacob Kerr

 

The Green Man of Eshwood Hall

by Jacob Kerr

The Green Man of Eshwood Hall is set in the early 1960s in the fictional English county of Northalbion. Despite its imaginary geography, the setting of this short novel is a familiar and realistic one – that of rural communities built around stately homes which, in a post-war era, already seemed remnants of bygone times.

The story follows thirteen-year-old Izzy, withdrawn from school to look after her younger sister and a baby, in view of her mother’s mysterious chronic heart ailment.  The dysfunctional family travel from place to place, depending on the temporary jobs landed from time to time by her idealistic handyman father.  Eshwood Hall, a dilapitated country estate, is the family’s latest home. 

Izzy comes across as unhappy, continuously bearing the brunt of her mother’s – often unjustified – complaints.  Her solitary, escapist adventures lead her to an abandoned chapel in the woods, inhabited by the Green Man of the title, clearly based on the eponymous character from British folklore.  The Green Man initially seems like a benevolent figure, willing to help Izzy solve some of her problems.  But his assistance comes at an increasingly bloodier price.   

This novel is purportedly the first of a series of folk-horror novels sharing a similar setting.  There is much that is promising here, not least the way in which Kerr draws upon elements of authentic folktales.  The narrative is also striking in inhabiting a sort of “liminal” world, at once imaginary and familiar – the post-war period, for instance, is brilliantly evoked even though most of the narrative is fantastical in nature.

Where I felt the novel suffered was in a certain unevenness in tone and style.  At its start, it looks as if this will be a delightfully eerie “haunted house” story, and it travels quite a bit down that route, before the Green Man is introduced, and the story suddenly changes direction.  There is throughout a sense of wit and humour – the wry narrative voice of fable and folk-tale – which for, the most part, works very well. But by the end, this approach seems to jar with the rapid escalation of violence.  This is a novel of many parts, and they don’t always coalesce well.    

Format

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published

October 6, 2022 by Serpent's Tail