Underdogs by Louise Powell review – a powerful debut with plenty of northern soul

The adjoining villages of Easington and Easington Colliery in the coalfields of east Durham make the perfect case study of the shift from England’s industrial boomtime to terminal decline. Twenty miles from a major town or city, they’ve been left to languish ever since Thatcher went to war with the industry that made them. If you want to understand why the white working class feel abandoned today, go to Easington Colliery and its surrounding villages.

It’s this community that Middlesbrough-born writer Louise Powell brings to life in a powerful debut set in the world of greyhound racing, or “flapping”. Underdogs is an utterly authentic depiction of an England that’s overlooked, but still very much alive. Pigeon lofts and flat caps, meat raffles and social clubs – all still exist, just very rarely in 21st-century novels.

Ten-year-old George Wheatley and his broken father Reg, both grieving the loss of George’s mother, who died two years earlier, are drawn into the dog-track culture by charismatic ex-miner Bertie, who despite the “half-pint of black phlegm he hawked up off his lungs every mornin’” decides not to pursue an incapacity benefit claim as he can make better money rinsing out the various illegal bookmakers by racing his dogs. When the bookies refuse to take Bertie’s bets he ropes in those down on their luck to race his dogs for him, and hands over his bitch Goldie, “twenny-nine kilo of muscles coiled like springs … a Ferrari of an engine in her fawn chest and a nose that could been made by Concorde”. Scores of those on the breadline have benefited from Bertie’s hustle.

The love that George feels for Goldie is matched only by his need to survive in an uncompromising adult world where the greatest threat comes from aggrieved bookmaker Baz, who has designs on their prized canine charge. Powell is strongest when describing the details of track life, a seemingly simple pursuit given a dark edge by the high-stakes money changing hands and further complicated by the treatment of these graceful creatures who are bred and discarded for human amusement and profit.

That the novel is set in 1998 is significant; all of County Durham’s pits had finally closed, but major regeneration investment was on its way from local boy Tony Blair, with his talk of “regional task forces” and “enterprise zones”. Old slag piles were soon to became nature reserves and pithead monuments. A bright new future was promised, though it’s barely glimpsed here; today Easington has one of the whitest demographics in the country (currently 98.4%), and was the place worst hit by 2025 disability allowance cuts.

Here, then, is a hard-scratch existence based around family alliances and power struggles in the dying days of an analogue world, where scars received from police truncheons at Orgreave are shown and shared, and where premature death stalks the terraced streets. George and Reg emerge as tender and quietly heroic; the father’s grief for his lost wife is almost overwhelming at times, as are the reminders of George’s malnutrition. This is real first-world poverty, as it still exists today. During the second world war British-based fascist William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, remarked that “the people of Easington will be eating greyhounds, not raising them”; he sorely underestimated just how much the English love their dogs, and it’s no coincidence that Powell’s descriptions of the greyhound’s meals are more mouthwatering than anything father and son eat.

North-east writers of literary fiction have always had plenty to sing about, but not much in the way of support from the publishing industry; “too bleak” and “too northern” are words familiar to many of us from the region. Given the rich cultural tradition of storytelling and folk song, always told in distinctively melodic vernacular voices, this still feels like an oversight. With recent novels from Eliza Clark, Glen James Brown, Jessica Andrews and Lucy Rose all finding critical favour, it’s clear that there are infinite Englands in existence. And as Underdogs movingly demonstrates, it’s these untold stories that need to be on the page – now more than ever.

Benjamin Myers’s most recent novel is Jesus Christ Kinski (Bloomsbury).