A chilling novel in which motherhood is as terrifying as murder

Telegraph

08-03-2025

Anyone thinking of becoming a mother would be forgiven for steering clear of contemporary fiction. Barely a month seems to pass by now without another horror-style account from female authors of the sleep-incinerated fug of early parenthood: think Claire Kilroy's Soldier Soldier; Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch; Szilvia Molnar's The Nursery. Each blurred the borders between madness and motherhood with immersive lyricism and – admittedly – a painful accuracy, but one which didn't quite compensate for the now familiar confines of their territory.
Naomi Booth's third novel, Raw Content, sits intriguingly askew within this genre, drawing on rather different cultural and historical horrors. Grace has recently given birth to Rosa after a casual relationship with Ryan, a musician she met in London, and the pair are gamely making a go of things in Grace's cramped one-bed flat in York. Inevitably, Grace is more claustrophobically consumed by her baby who, as is common to these sorts of novels, is described in a sort of shell-shocked poetry as alien, even aberrant, 'catastrophically small… a dark sea-fish… a cawing pterodactyl of an infant'.
Nor can Grace escape the mythic forcefield of her native Yorkshire in which she grew up – a landscape of 'derelict furnace chimneys and sawtooth roofs' where 'children lay buried under gorse and heather in unmarked graves'. The Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murders in the 1960s, which did so much to invoke fear in modern parents, seep with a kind of viral stealth into Grace's emotionally scrambled state, heightening her awareness of her daughter's tender skin. This is a novel that finds an awful beauty in the fragility of the body, and the shocking vulnerability of the child.
Perversely, though, the Moors murders are one of the quieter strands wrapping around Grace's brain, thanks to her career as a legal publisher. She has spent years notating, among other crimes, instances of appalling child abuse, the rigour and calm the profession demands at stark dissonance with the job in hand. Then there's her now retired police officer father, who worked to prosecute child abusers before an instance of 'institutional failings' torpedoed his career. And compounding her conviction of childhood as innately defenceless and imperilled is her estranged mother, who abandoned Grace and her sister Isobel – a now untethered, pill-popping adult whose chaotic visits provide welcome relief for the reader – when Grace was nine, for reasons that are never fully explained; perhaps because, you sense, they're inexplicable.
David Peace and Gordon Burn have both explored in fiction the legacy of serial murderers on landscape, community and popular culture in Yorkshire and beyond. I'd argue Booth's novel loses something in comparison for being exclusively concentrated on the individual and yet, at the same time, so diffuse in its references to a more generalised history of child abuse. Throughout Raw Content Grace is convinced she will harm her baby, as though her personal and cultural inheritance is destined to play out through her. It's a potent idea, yet it's played out primarily in the abstract; it's also a delusion on a par with the sort of self-sabotaging thoughts experienced by many young mothers and Booth's novel feels boxed-in by framing it as something commonplace and explicable. Booth can write – her prose is often exacting and surprising at the same time – but I wish this novel had built with greater ambition on its initial dark promise.