Hardy in miniature

Susan Hill's Black Sheep reads like a Thomas Hardy novel in miniature. It is that much of a downer, beautifully written but still depressing.

She takes us to a British coal-mining town called Mount of Zeal at an unspecified time in the past. The Howker family, like most of the families in Mount of Zeal, is dependent on the mine. Boys grow up to become miners. Girls grow up to become the wives of miners. Most of the men work in the heat and filth deep below ground. The privileged few manage the work from above.

Except for a young daughter named Rose and a boy named Ted, Evie Howker has a house full of miners. Fortunately they work different shifts, so there is room for all in that small house and those few beds, but there is always somebody who needs a meal and so her work never ends. One son runs away without a word, never to be heard from again.

Years pass, and both Rose and Ted, like the brother who ran away, dream of a better life. Rose sees her chance in marriage to the son of one of those privileged families. Ted climbs over the hill and begs for a job tending sheep for a farmer. It pays less than mining coal, but the work is above ground. Hopes are dashed, however, in Hill as in Hardy. Rose's husband turns out to be a brute, and she begins to have eyes for another man. A mine disaster kills the Howker men. (I'm not sure how this happens if they are working different shifts.) Ted decides that to support his widowed mother, he must leave sheepherding and go down into the mine. Then things only get worse.

Hill covers many years in her powerful 135-page novel. Her title refers to Rose and Ted, the black sheep of the Howker family, who dare to defy convention and expectations by trying to live their own lives their own way. Yet as in Hardy, as well as in the Bible, the rain falls on both the just and the unjust.