The Woodcutter

The front and rear endpapers of Reginald Hill's standalone mystery The Woodcutter reproduce Winslow Homer's 1891 painting of the same name.  Homer's woodcutter may be in a very American landscape, but he appears in Hill's Cumbrian novel under a variety of guises: inspiration, model, and sometimes warning.  Woods, of course, occupy a very special place in fairy tales, and the fairy tale turns out to be one of this novel's most prominent influences.  "Once upon a time I was living happily ever after," says our protagonist, Wilfred--a.k.a. Wolf--Hadda.  "That's right.  Like in a fairy tale" (17).    The Woodcutter traces the collapse and reconstruction of Wolf's fairy tale plot, which crosses paths along the way with spy thrillers, Wuthering Heights (Wolf's life story bears some resemblance to Heathcliff's), the book of Job (albeit a Godless version), and, as others have pointed out, revenge tragedy.  And the novel's thorough-going sweep of its villains by the end is almost entirely due to poetic justice, rather than the legal variety.

In a twist on Hill's usual method, most of the novel takes place not in a loosely-defined present, but in a precisely-dated but still loosely-defined future, with much of the action taking place about fifteen or sixteen years from now.  Wisely hedging his bets, Hill informs us that everything in his imagined future is much the same as it is now...which, in fact, produces a rather grim view of England.  Wolf's meteoric rise and fall rests on his successful work in high finance, which leaves him at the mercy of his "friends" (who jointly conspire to defraud him).  Security cameras are everywhere; Wolf spends much of his time in a private prison; casual racism lurks everywhere; terrorist threats still loom large; the police force is riddled with corruption.  And, in the background, lurks the very-ironically initialled JC, a sort of Mycroft Holmes-ish character who appears to do nothing, yet has his fingers in every proverbial pie.  JC, the patron of many rising young men, at first appears to be Wolf's "savior," but the mantra he learns from his father--"When love is in opposition to grim necessity, there is usually only one winner" (6)--warns us that this savior sacrifices, instead of being sacrificed. 

Significantly, where JC is very much a creature of London, Wolf's roots strike deep into rural Cumbria--even though his successful days saw him turn into an international jet-setter.  Hill's earlier novels have invoked and sometimes deconstructed the "village cozy" mystery, as in the comic Jane Austen homage Pictures of Perfection (set in the quasi-utopian village of Enscombe) or, more recently, the much grimmer The Stranger House (where the village has nothing cozy about it).  Here, the village is neither good nor evil--some residents are fine, some are jerks--but it lacks the dehumanizing qualities of JC's London.  Nick Hay suggests that "one of the morals of the tale might be about the dangers of leaving a home to which one has such an umbilical tie," but Hill takes aim at something larger: the evils of any ambition that takes financial success as its primary reward.  Wolf's wife Imogen, lawyer Toby, and purportedly close friends Johnny and Pippa all manage to abscond with cash from his companies; Imogen then seals the deal by marrying Toby.  After, of course, a conspiracy to jail Wolf for sex crimes, just to get him out of everyone's way.  Imogen's mother, Lady Kira, married the much-older Sir Leon Ulphingstone for his money and position, and now consorts with a wealthy Russian criminal.  For that matter, one of the detectives investigating Wolf's case winds up taking a bribe.  By contrast, Wolf's "elf," the psychiatrist Alva Ozigbo, must ultimately choose between her career ambitions and doing the right thing, and PI McLucky, formerly a detective assigned to watch Wolf when he is hospitalized, similarly winds up assisting him for reasons moral as well as monetary.  Cash, in other words, turns out to be corrosive.

This being Hill, the narrative frequently dwells on both plotting and interpretation.  After Wolf writes a  truthful account of his troubles, which leaves Alva "disappointed" because "he was still in complete denial" (52), he manages to trick her into supporting his release on parole by faking his confessional texts.  In effect, Alva, despite her close-reading abilities, falls prey to double-dealing dramatic monologues, in which the dramatic ironies of Wolf's revelations (despite his unwillingness to admit it, he is a criminal) turn out to cloak the revelation she initially refused to accept (he's innocent).  Wolf's passage through the novel turns out to be marked by such moments of dissonance, some not of his direct intent, whether it's the local clergyman revisiting his own prejudices or a singularly happy-go-lucky ex-friend realizing that "today something was ending, and something was starting, something that not een the cleverest of solicitors was going to be able to put right, something that meant nothing was ever going to be the same again" (424).  Initially the puppet in other people's plots, Wolf succeeds by gaining control of his own--and upsetting every other narrative in the process. 

As it happens, the least satisfactory aspect of the plot is its conclusion.  Putting aside the bizarre similarity to Iain Pears' Stone's Fall (the final revelation and denouement, while not identical, certainly overlap), the novel loses hold on its ability to keep fairy tale and psychological realism working in tandem.  This reader found neither the final self-sacrifice nor the romantic wrap-up plausible, even though there's foreshadowing for both; Pictures of Perfection, Hill's previous venture into fairy-tale plotting, handled this aspect rather better.  Overall, though, the novel is an absorbing read.