Red Meat

Readers escape and go someplace else, and some of them, when they return, bring things back and use them to become writers. Apparently, judging from their fictions, young British readers have been going to America. In different ways, their novels are all done up American style, as in supersized with cheese, or in a leather jacket, head tilted, with a thumb hooked through the belt loop of the jeans. The Borrowed Hills, a debut from Scott Preston, who comes from the English Lake District, is marketed both as a hard look at the neglected moors and mountains of the English northwest, and as a reimagined American Western, with a story and sensibility “for fans of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy.” It makes an authentic assertion with its narration in Cumbrian dialect, the “hardscrabble voice of a forgotten England,” but the “thrilling adventure,” which gets started with some sheep-rustling and has many borrowings from the American frontier, would seem to bely the tribute to home.