Fellside (2016)

Fellside (2016)

Author: M.R. Carey  |  Page Count: 496

'He saw her life as a three-act tragedy with opiates in the role of major antagonist. And her face mesmerised him. It had something better than beauty or symmetry. It had transparency.'

Jess Moulson wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of who she is or how she got there. It's a clichéd, uninspired middle school plot device that I've encountered literally dozens of times before – I even used it myself when I was eleven! Things don't look good for Fellside, but sometimes the quality of the writing can make even that situation interesting again, right? Sadly, that's not the case herein.

A second device runs alongside the first, a situation in which Jess is characterised as much by the thoughts of the people that attend to her as by her own hazy recollections; in essence, we learn about the observer, the observed and the recollections of the latter at the same time as she does. It's all well and good in theory, but Jess is semi-conscious for a significant portion of the book's first quarter, which leads to a lot of similar observations time and again, very few of which are what I'd classify as enthralling.

I know I'm shitting on the book pretty bad from the beginning, but it's genuinely how I feel. It does get better, but it avoids the good stuff for far too long. I was almost 200 pages in before I felt that it was finally picking up an active pace that I could get along with.

The majority of the story is set inside a women's prison. Carey spends a great deal of time describing the workings of the place, the hierarchy, the dodgy dealings of the staff and the inmates, etc, and to his credit it does begin to feel like a real place. Unfortunately, the place is more often than not something that reminded me of Wentworth Detention Centre. Yes, at times reading Fellside was like reading a Prisoner Cell Block H novelisation, except it's set in the Yorkshire moors. I was half expecting an 'accident' in the laundry room and an angry vinegar-tits joke. (Who knew that my secret late-night viewings of PCBH on ITV would be useful one day!)

It struck me after reading that even though M.R. Carey and Mike Carey is the same person, one of them is more appealing to me than the other. Mike Carey is one of my absolute favourite comic authors, whereas M.R. Carey is an author of novels that seem all too restrained by comparison. Carey himself is a great writer, but in trying to distance his pseudonym from the other he's excised much of the essential quality that made him unique in the first place.

The final thirty or so pages are closer to the Mike end of the scale. They're vibrant, creative and by far the best part of the novel. It's a shame that the preceding 450 pages were bland.

NOTE: the round yellow sticker on the cover advertising Carey's previous novel is not a sticker, it's printed directly onto the page. And in case we somehow miss the ugly yellow stain ruining the artist's intended composition they printed it again on the back cover, book-shaped but the same bright yellow, because covers are now advertising space in the publishing world.