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Moors
Bleak landscapes spell trouble in The Followers. Photograph: Alamy
Bleak landscapes spell trouble in The Followers. Photograph: Alamy

The Followers by Rebecca Wait review – a great surging shout of a novel

This article is more than 8 years old
A single mother is lured with her daughter into a small religious community on the Yorkshire moors

Cults: providing authors with plots since the days of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Rebecca Wait is the latest in a long line of novelists – from Dashiell Hammett, Robert Heinlein and Margaret Atwood all the way to Dan Brown – who have taken fanaticism as their subject, and it’s not hard to see why. Cults feed on intensity; they are invariably constructed around a charismatic leader; their self-imposed isolation turns them into pressure cookers without safety valves. The Followers, which tells the story of the Ark – a small religious community on the Yorkshire moors in thrall to the magnetic Nathaniel – dutifully defers to the generic conventions: the wild-eyed denunciations of sin, and the sanctions inflicted on those who transgress, are horribly well done. In the end, though, it isn’t the relish with which Wait describes the cult’s drama so much as her feel for its mundanity that elevates this novel. Evil is most terrifying when it is most banal; it turns out the same is true when the evil comes dressed up as holiness.

The Followers begins some time after the Ark’s dissolution, and it is clear from the off that things didn’t end well. Judith has been visiting her mother, Stephanie, in prison for years; we don’t know precisely what Stephanie is doing time for, but it is evidently connected with her membership of the Ark, which she joined with a protesting Judith when her daughter was just 12. The narrative jumps back and forth between a present day in which Judith is living with her gran, cushioning herself against her history with prescription drugs, and a past in which the appalling events that led to Stephanie’s imprisonment slowly come into focus.

When we first meet her, Stephanie is an ordinary woman living an ordinary life: single mother, working in a cafe, “awarding herself little treats in the evening. A glass or two of wine ... Chocolate. Crisps.” The challenge for Wait is to convince us that such a person could be persuaded to become a follower, and in building her case, she doesn’t put a foot wrong. There is no cheap catalyst here; rather, in clean, unaffected prose, Wait places Stephanie in a grindingly dispiriting situation: we enter the mind of a woman who has reached that point in her 30s when her dead-end job and shabby flat are no longer stopgaps but have become her life. Nathaniel’s entrapment of her is convincing because, rather than fire-and-brimstone threats, he makes promises: good sex, a sympathetic ear and, crucially, a way out. We’re lulled, too, by his reasonableness; his irrefutable logic. “You’re going to miss trips to Tesco?” he laughs, when Stephanie expresses doubts about a permanent retreat. Of course she won’t: no one in their right mind would. The way he tells it, the initiation is like a religious version of the journeys house buyers make in the TV show Escape to the Country.

The first indication that there is something rotten beneath the benevolent gloss is provided by the landscape. Not since Mr Lockwood set out to pay a visit to his landlord have the moors been this inimical: rather than a fresh and lovely sop for abandoning the world, they are “ragged and vast ... sheets of grass struggling beneath gorse ... jagged rocks standing out... like shark fins”. The wind is a constant presence, battering walls, rattling windows, slithering through grass; when Judith attempts to leave the commune, it rises up and beats her back. Fortunately, she is not easily cowed. One of the novel’s strengths is how well it delineates the Ark’s children, who inhabit their own subplot. Their concerns are only superficially connected with those of the adults, and, as they invent games based on the more bloodthirsty Bible stories (“Let’s play Jericho!”), they subvert the cult’s hegemony without realising it. Judith’s arrival throws them into chaos: a real, honest-to-goodness 21st-century 12-year-old, complete with Game Boy and a frowning sense of responsibility for her struggling mother. Her incredulous irritation with the cult’s arbitrary tenets, together with her mulish refusal to accede to them, are as convincing as Stephanie’s exhausted submission; Judith’s stumbling progress through the book’s present-day sections are all the more awful because we saw how robust she was as a kid. But childhood is a time of easy certainties, while adulthood is all shades of grey: it is Stephanie’s search for childish surety that pitches them into the cult in the first place. The suspicion that Judith might choose a similar abdication hangs over the novel like mist on the moor.

The serious questions that The Followers poses about love, faith and responsibility blend with Wait’s propulsive plotting and the complicity she creates through the power of her writing to form a great surging shout of a novel, which left me, in the end, in tears. Without wanting to proselytise, I’d urge you to buy it.

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