Waterline
Page 30
Despite this interest in books there was no burning desire to be a novelist from an early age. “I never had that thought ‘I want to be a writer’ and I still don’t think I have. I’ve wanted to write a particular book and then wanted to write another one.” After finishing university and deciding he wanted to write a book he enrolled on a creative writing course at Goldsmith’s College.
With Out Backward, his first attempt at a full-blown novel, he hit the ground running, securing a lucrative two-book deal and bypassing the usual pile of rejection letters that often greet even the most gifted fledgling novelists.
Although he’s not lived in Yorkshire since he was eighteen, he still has a fondness for the place. “My wife’s from Northallerton and even though we don’t have plans to move back at the moment, I’d see us going back there at some point; I certainly hope so.”
Despite all the critical acclaim, Raisin is wary of the pitfalls of believing your own hype. “I think it’s better to do things step by step than have this big, pressurizing career in front of you where you have to write X number of books and each one has to be brilliant and better than the last.”
In fact, he doesn’t even like to call himself a writer. “I still feel reticent to call myself that because it feels a bit naff. I think a lot of writers, not all, use it to try and sound impressive and I don’t feel that. Maybe there’s a certain part of me that thinks if you talk about it too much then you might chase it away. I can’t really do it now, but in the past I would usually say I’m a waiter when people asked what I did, because it was true.”
He’s recently started writing short stories and is enjoying the challenge of doing something a little different, not that he takes it for granted.
“There’s always that nagging feeling that you won’t be able to do it again. I never sit down and think ‘yes, I’ve nailed it, I know exactly what I’m doing.’ I always have to work for it and when I finish a book there’s no sense of tub-thumping euphoria, it’s more a sigh of relief.”
Read On
Have You Read?
More by Ross Raisin
OUT BACKWARD
Sam Marsdyke is a lonely young man, dogged by an incident in his past and forced to work his family farm instead of attending school in his Yorkshire village. He methodically fills his life with daily routines and adheres to strict boundaries that keep him at a remove from the townspeople. But one day he spies Josephine, his new neighbor from London. From that moment on, Sam’s carefully constructed protections begin to crumble—and what starts off as a harmless friendship between an isolated loner and a defiant teenage girl takes a most disturbing turn.
“Ross Raisin’s story of how a disturbed but basically well-intentioned rural youngster turns into a malevolent sociopath is both chilling in its effect and convincing in its execution.”—J. M. Coetzee
“The lush language in this debut novel has some fine literary ears (Colm Toibin, Stewart O’Nan, Mary Karr) in awe. . . . Your heart goes out to Sam, creature of the moors. There’s an ancient Celtic strain in Raisin’s writing, all but unspoken: the idea that monsters are the embodiments of our darkest selves, pushed to the edges of normal life, straining on the outskirts.”
—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“Out Backward more [than A Clockwork Orange] convincingly registers the internal logic of unredeemable delinquency, a dangerous subjectivity that perverts compassion and sees everything as an extension of itself.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Undeniably he’s made a new world. . . . Utterly frightening and electrifying.”
—Joshua Ferris, author of The Unnamed and Then We Came to the End
U.K. PRAISE FOR
Waterline
“Ross Raisin was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2009 following the success of his first novel, God’s Own Country, which had critics clutching at superlatives. If there’s any justice in the world of literary awards, he should now be heading for one of the big ones. Far from joining that teetering pile of disappointing second novels, Waterline is stunning—a poignant, shocking, wry, shaming, yet profoundly generous, and cunningly crafted classic in the making. Overselling it? If you’re looking for the definitive novel for our times, this is the strongest candidate I’ve read for ages.”
—Mary Crockett, The Scotsman
“[A] modern philosophical treatise that drips with dark humor. . . . The mere cadence of the sentences and the meandering storytelling, in a lilting Glaswegian accent, cannot help but carry you away. . . . The dialect throughout is mesmerizing. If Thomas Hardy had wanted to rewrite Trainspotting it might have ended up a bit like this.”
—Viv Groskop, The Times
“Waterline announces Raisin as a profound thinker as well as a distinctive voice.”
—Esquire
“The counterpoint of personal grief and insurmountable social problems are, through Mick’s decline, beautifully done. . . . The energy of the book comes from the language, which has the verve of a really good raconteur. . . . Harrowing, and powerfully expressed. . . . Raisin is a novelist of terrific ability and great verve. . . . One day he is going to write a masterpiece.”
—Philip Hensher, The Telegraph
“The vernacular is only one aspect of the vitality and inventiveness of Raisin’s writing. . . . A writer of outstanding talent and it will be fascinating to see what he comes up with next.”
—Peter Carty, The Independent
“Masterly. . . . There are rare novels that embed themselves in your sensibility so profoundly you can imagine conversations arising between characters that never occurred on the page. . . . Completely comprehensible, yet operatic in its tragedy. At no point do we sense the mechanics of a story: the writing is so subtle and controlled, so liberated from the need for dramatic gestures, that it is hard to single out the individual stations of Mick’s collapse. His disintegration is made all the more heartbreaking as the tragedies accumulate. Raisin’s creation of Mick is a work of grace: a human being rendered by a triumph of ventriloquism and empathy through a geographically specific Glaswegian working-class voice. The obvious and daunting comparison is with James Kelman: that same austere mastery, sparkling with its own humour, belligerent inner voices constructing a cage of language beyond which the wider society and its oppressions become apparent. . . . Full of compassion and moral imperative.”
—Alan Warner, The Guardian
“Raisin is shaping up to be one of our most extraordinary writers.”
—Catherine Taylor, The Telegraph
“Heartbreaking. . . . Waterline is harrowing. . . . But it is also lovely and finally redemptive, and Raisin shows a deeper development as a novelist in this book. . . . Waterline is a great read, and Mick’s story is one you won’t forget. With this second novel, Ross Raisin confirms himself as an exciting talent, a unique, gifted, and generous voice, a young writer with a vision broad far beyond his years.”
—David Vann, Financial Times
“Ross Raisin’s debut, God’s Own Country, was deservedly acclaimed, and Waterline is similarly impressive, with Raisin again making vivid, compelling use of the vernacular. . . . It remains to the last supremely empathic, and Raisin’s powers of observation, intense.”
—Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail
“Electric. . . . What impresses about Raisin is the all-encompassing nature of his imaginative empathy, and the way in which he makes the reader complicit in his character’s fate.”
—Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times
PRAISE FOR
Out Backward
“Ross Raisin’s story of how a disturbed but basically well-intentioned rural youngster turns into a malevolent sociopath is both chilling in its effect and convincing in its execution.”
—J. M. Coetzee
“The lush language in this debut novel has some fine literary ears (Colm Tóibín, Stewart O’Nan, Mary Karr) in awe. . . . Your heart goes out to Sam, creature of the moors. There’s a
n ancient Celtic strain in Raisin’s writing, all but unspoken: the idea that monsters are the embodiments of our darkest selves, pushed to the edges of normal life, straining on the outskirts.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Out Backward more [than A Clockwork Orange] convincingly registers the internal logic of unredeemable delinquency, a dangerous subjectivity that perverts compassion and sees everything as an extension of itself.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Undeniably he’s made a new world. . . . Utterly frightening and electrifying.”
—Joshua Ferris, author of The Unnamed and Then We Came to the End
“An entirely original voice. . . . Marsdyke, who blends colloquialism with flights of verbal fancy, is like no other character in contemporary fiction.”
—Sunday Times (London)
“From the first sentence, Ross Raisin’s deft (and daft) use of language makes the reader swoon. Soon enough, though, you start to feel woozy, as if drunk or under a spell, and by the time you realize exactly what’s happening, he and his narrator are holding you close and it’s too late to get away. Out Backward is equally twisted and brilliant—a lovely, upsetting book.”
—Stewart O’Nan, author of Emily Alone and Songs for the Missing
“Out Backward is a helluva read—poetically pitched in the mode of The Butcher Boy, and with a plot that you race through. Raisin draws profound moral subtlety and complexity from his sociopath; we’re deep in the madman’s head, à la Dostoevsky or Kafka. This is a dazzler.”
—Mary Karr, author of Lit
“First-time novelist Ross Raisin is artfully familiar with classics of the English demotic novel such as Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. . . . The plot is familiar, but not the way Raisin deftly uses Yorkshire dialect to create speed and a fictional space that feels new. . . . Here’s a writer who uses obscurity to cunning advantage.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Out Backward captures a dark voice with considerable flair and wit and skill. Raisin’s control of tone is original, at times playful, a cross between the whimsy and lyricism of Huckleberry Finn and the nightmare of The Butcher Boy. This is a compelling, disturbing, and often very funny novel.”
—Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and The Master
“A few pages with Sam Marsdyke are unforgettable. Rare are the writers who can create such a funny yet terrifying narrator; the comparison is the murderous Francie Brady in Patrick McCabe’s classic The Butcher Boy.”
—Financial Times (London)
“Risk-taking, postmodern, yet defiantly readable. . . . Raisin not only narrates the novel in Marsdyke’s voice, but manages to create a world out of the young man’s anger and preconceptions. [He] never allows Marsdyke’s perspective to shift, or his understanding of himself to change, resulting in a final scene as chilling as any in recent memory.”
—Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“A masterful debut.”
—The Observer (London)
“Sam is more than the sum of his language. For all his oddity, and the periodic glint of something jagged and sinister, he holds our attention, even as he slips closer to catastrophe—holds our attention, and our affection, too.”
—New York Observer
“A beautifully written, utterly absorbing novel by an author destined for great things.” —The Bookseller (London)
“The most excitingly original new fiction talent to emerge in Britain since Martin Amis first decided to try his hand at literary satire with The Rachel Papers.”
—The Irish Times (Dublin)
“A wonderfully unique novel—a comic commentary on rural decline and a deeply unsettling character study.”
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
Also by Ross Raisin
Out Backward
(published in the UK under the title God’s Own Country)
Credits
Cover photographs © Mary Evans
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books.
WATERLINE. Copyright © 2012 by Ross Raisin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-06-210397-0
EPub Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780062103987
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