Book review: The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

Xenobe Purvis’ timely and exquisite little debut manages to deftly carry off its titular pun: this is a novel about five sisters who, it is claimed, turn into dogs – a phenomenon never named in the book, but which provides one of the title’s meanings – but it is also about their fellow villagers’ responses to these claims, hounding chief among them. The question the novel poses is which of these two phenomena is the truly monstrous one? The answer is clear early on, but Purvis’ gift for building atmosphere and character means the reader is impelled to keep reading to the inevitably violent conclusion.

Little Nettlebed, the fictional 18th century Oxfordshire hamlet which forms the novel’s setting, is in the throes of two kinds of damaging heat: it is summer, and with the heat has come ‘the season of strangeness’. But it is also a community dominated by masculine bloodlust, the heat of which emanates from the local pub, a place where random acts of animal cruelty form a delightful treat from a publican to his regulars. The most regular of these regulars is Pete Darling, ferryman, who spends his days drinking while he waits for customers, and who professes a divine mandate thanks to what he believes was a visitation by an angel, but who actually ‘hated anything weaker than himself… really, it was women he hated the most.’

On the outside of this community, both by physical proximity and the fact that they are the only women we see who are not defined by traditional, submissive feminine roles, are the five Mansfield sisters. The girls’ aloof behaviour – which is just their satisfaction with each other’s company and lack of dependence on the male-dominated society of Little Nettlebed – enrages Pete because it makes him ‘feel less strong, less good. All he wanted to be seen.’ Poor soul!

The tragedy is that when Pete claims to have seen the girls turn into five black dogs, none of the villagers can muster complete disbelief. To make the tale more clearly a parable against such degenerate influences as Andrew Tate, Pete even enlists the help of a vulnerable young man to do his bidding in trying to bring down the sisters. And so masculine insecurity, and society’s inability to make sense of unfettered girlhood, leads to the hounding that drives the novel’s bloody denouement.

There is much to love in this book: Purvis’ writing is crisp, her depictions of the natural world beautiful. She builds unease with great skill, and her characters – barring one unfortunate and unnecessary piece of development in Temperance, the publican’s wife – are well drawn. But above all, she can tell a story that entertains and elucidates with equal power. And that’s why this reader will be quick to read whatever she produces next.