England Reversed

Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, Rebecca Gransden, Tangerine Press, 2025.

Michael Haneke’s film Time of the Wolf follows a mother and her two children as they traverse the French countryside following some kind of apocalyptic social collapse. We are only given small clues, namely that water is generally contaminated and all the cattle need to be burned. A mythology is slowly drip-fed, whispered between the survivors. A man chewing razor blades tells the family about 36 men known as the just that guard the Earth by walking straight into fire. Rebecca Gransden offers a decidedly English take on the post-apocalyptic trope in Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group filled with similarly poetic riddles which, as the title indicates, unfold in stark and visual present tense.

Gransden’s novel follows the journey of Flo travelling the English countryside looking for her twin brother, known simply as “bro”. Flo is like a flâneur drifting through a far more twisted version of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, a psycho-geographical tour of the southern landscape filled with poetic horror akin to the work of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman, offering haunting descriptions such as, “Glim glow flicks gold in the whole room, the place is a cloud dream as she wakes. It is as if the sun is a gem and she rests in the room that is its wood heart.” Gransden captures the bucolic sense of pastoral England, its tranquil, often tepid sense of safety, “Warm in the night. Soft in the night. The wood makes its dark, it stirs the black.” Flo walks under, “The sun a dull disc of pea soup.” However, Gransden sinks deeper into the unconscious English landscape and finds something older and far more troubling, as Flo encounters a series of ravaged strangers in this deserted wasteland. At one point she learns, “Those trucks, the ones outside. I watched them through the open door. They unloaded kids, lots of them. Took them off, holding hands. They were like dark shadows in the sun.”

Gransden boils her language down to single syllables. Conjunctions and adjectives are reduced to their skeletal limbs: empt (empty) mid (the middle of) neath (beneath) tween (between), giving the prose an Olde English feel. Similar to Time of the Wolf, we are out-of-time. Language has regressed into something darker, far further back. As Russell Hoban described in Riddley Walker, a science fiction novel set in Kent two thousand years after a nuclear war but with a culture similar to the medieval age, “The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you.” Flo puts herself on many roads and the world reveals itself to her in unfathomable tongues. Jacques Derrida once wrote, “I speak only one language, and it is not my own.” This England speaks an alien and lonely tongue, of a diminishing world of souls holding onto their innermost light whilst stumbling towards a monstrous twilight, where “Flo wakes to an empt grove. The light fades in pink sips, with sharp taints on the air, all sweet and gone. Dusk is as a dream in this place.”

What is the evil in these golden fields, the Lucifer in the air? Reminiscent of BBC science fiction films from the 70s such as The Stone Tape, at one point Flo reaches an oasis where, “We are in a quiet zone. No signals are received here. These hills, full of quartz, create a repellant effect. Transmissions, kind of, fold around this spot.” We learn that the terrifying danger to this place is known as the hum, with Flo told, “There is nought but death and the hum to the south. All are gone, all have fled. Doom breaks the shore, spreads in the veins of the land and air. The hum grows close.” When the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in April 1986, it flooded the air with blue light. One of the survivors, Alexander Yuvchenko, described stepping out and looking towards the reactor hall, where he saw a “very beautiful” laser-like beam of blue light that appeared to be “flooding up into infinity”. Gransden reverses the blue light of Chernobyl into an infrared hum.

Gransden’s prose is littered throughout Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group with an eerie sense of disease and cellular breakdown, “Spores move round the glen, they catch light to break it in side, and burn with god fire.” In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, three men navigate a restricted area known as the Zone looking for a room that grants one’s deepest wish; the secret desire that has made a person suffer the most. Flo ignores the warnings of others and continues south to find her twin brother, her other half at the end of the world. Syllables break apart like the radioactive inhibition of mitosis, whilst Flo continues, “Mi le and mi le on the same ground.” Language buckles and mutates under the heat of the hum, a terrible swarm of red atoms, its insidious frequency, death rising from the south. At the end of Ballard’s post-apocalyptic The Drowned World, his protagonist continues on his mission towards the equator: “27th day. Have rested and am moving south.” Flo is a flâneur of haunted Kent grasslands and ancient woodlands who waltzes towards the masque of red death, a blistering song filled with, “Red light. It strokes on her, lungs full of red.” Here the earth is red, the air is red. She follows an impossible vector. She walks into the fire.

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Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His published works include Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press, 2021); Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press, 2021); The Glass Abattoir (D.F.L. Lit, 2023); Songs of Xanthina (Broken Sleep Books, 2023); Psycho Viridian (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and So Tender a Killer (Filthy Loot, 2025).

[image: Lunar-shaped Ring Bezel and Grotesque Figures, Noël Rouillard ca. 1620–30