The Dig By Cynan Jones - book review: Tough Guy breaks new ground with a beastly story

Alan Warner has claimed that American novelists can be divided into Savants and Tough Guys. The first category includes Edith Wharton and Jonathan Franzen while Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy belong in the second. Deceptively plain prose attracts imitators which is why Tough Guy fiction, American or otherwise, often lapses into the kind of backwoods, beasts and bibles formula which seduces suburban readers whose idea of rusticity is the Hay Festival. The Welsh writer Cynan Jones, who has been compared to both Hemingway and McCarthy, might be a Tough Guy but he imitates nobody in his indelible third novel.

Down a dark lane, an unnamed man dumps a mutilated badger, "its nose hung loose and bloodied, hanging from a sock of skin". The awful immediacy of that "sock" sets the standard for a novel which features memorable phrases on almost every page. A sink filled with "a meringue of suds", rain falling with a "sussurating sound", but, early on, a familiar term of abuse indicates that this cruel man will stalk the story. "Bitch," he says, stamping on the badger's leg.

A more sympathetic character is Daniel, the young sheep farmer whose wife was kicked to death by a horse. Cleaning his shed, the "hypochlorite stinging his nose", reminds Daniel of childhood swimming lessons which leads him to remember that he and his wife attended the same junior school. It might seem trivial but the chain of associations, as scenes switch between present and past, illustrates that for Daniel grief is everywhere. Later, we learn about Daniel's wife moving into his farmhouse: "The bigger changes they seemed to make together, putting the shower in, painting the upstairs rooms." This simple sentence evokes the slowness of life in the rural Welsh setting and captures the way that mundane activities bind couples.

When Daniel separates a dead lamb from its mother, the reader remembers the unborn child that died with his wife. Daniel doesn't know that his wife was pregnant and omniscient narration allows Jones to show every aspect of a landscape which connects past and present, living and dead, people and animals, as his two protagonists proceed along a tense narrative collision course.

The title refers to a traumatic scene in which the man forces a badger from its sett but Jones reaches deep in to Welsh soil to create this short, powerful novel. Within its rhythms, a battle for land is starkly dramatised and important questions are prompted: to whom does the countryside truly belong? What fate awaits those whose lives are bound up with it? Read The Dig and decide for yourself.