Halfway​ through Jesus Christ Kinski, the narrator, a nameless writer who shares many biographical details with Benjamin Myers, describes the reception of a book that sounds a lot like his novel The Offing (2019). ‘After twenty years of putting his words out into the world to decent reviews and aggressively modest sales,’ the writer reflects, ‘his most recent novel, a relatively gentle affair (harsh critics might call it twee) which he had written primarily as an antidote to his anxiety over the state of things, and with no publishing deal in place, had, against the odds, unexpectedly found a home – and gone on to become a bestseller – in Germany.’

The Offing was something of a departure for Myers, who began his career writing bleak Northern noir: novels about stoic, often unexpectedly sensitive men, many of whom had left home in pursuit of someone or something, or were being pursued themselves. These characters tended to be outsiders – ‘knuckle men’, Gypsies, tortured rock stars – who were in touch with the ‘old ways’ (sometimes the ‘auld ways’) and lived in tune with nature. They dug and they worked the land and they fought and they snared rabbits, and they were rendered in prose that aspired to the sparse behaviourism of Cormac McCarthy.

You could call this constellation of interests ‘masculinity’, but if so, it was a masculinity undercut by a degree of irony (a collection of short stories from 2021 was titled Male Tears) and by a wistful, at times even sentimental, reverence for the natural world. Being from a particular place was important to many of these characters, but so too was escaping it, if only to return. That place was usually the North of England (Myers was born in County Durham and moved to London to live in a squat and write for Melody Maker, before settling in Hebden Bridge). It was a place where it was often raining, rain that fell ‘with timeless Northern fury’, or like ‘diminishing sparks’; rain like ‘wet bolts’ and ‘steel rivets’; rain like ‘spigot water spitting into a bucket’ or ‘the filings of a milled Guinea bit onto a folded page of paper’. There was ‘plum-line rain’ and ‘light, playful rain deceptive in its ability to nevertheless soak to the skin’. There was even rain ‘Yorkshiring down with vertical vengeance’.

Myers’s first proper novel, Richard (2010), was about the Manic Street Preachers lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards, who went missing after leaving a London hotel in 1995 on the eve of the band’s US tour. Two weeks after his disappearance, his car was found at a motorway service station near the Severn Bridge; he was declared legally dead in 2008. Richard was written as an extended internal dialogue, with the voice of Edwards’s saner self interspersed with long italicised sections signalling the intrusion of darker thoughts. The plot was constrained by the known facts of Edwards’s life, but Myers did allow himself to imagine the guitarist’s death as an epiphanic moment on a hillside next to a reservoir, surrounded by ‘valleys and fields and peaks and sedimentary landslides … blackened peaks and misty troughs’. Edwards’s fellow band members called the book ‘really presumptuous’. Myers thought they’d been ‘charitable’ in their assessment.

The subject of Pig Iron (2012), his next novel, was another lost young man: John-John Wisdom, a Gypsy striving to escape the legacy of his father, Mac, a champion bare-knuckle boxer. The Wisdoms have ‘violence running through’ them like ‘a coal seam in the northern soil’, but John-John is intelligent and sensitive (as shown by the fact that he read his way through the English canon while in prison). Pig Iron has an uneven plot, but it’s told in a compelling voice: a fizzing, Romani-inflected vernacular seasoned with Yorkshire idioms that don’t succumb to pastiche. Gadgies speak in accents ‘as thick and bitter as valley’s poteen’, saying things like ‘Me Mam and Dad knew this. It’s every traveller’s business to know the way of the clans. What lines run where.’

In both subject and tone Pig Iron anticipated Myers’s next book, Beastings (2014), an unsettling novel about a manic, cocaine-fuelled priest (‘it just gives you a little zip of a morning,’ the prescribing doctor tells him. ‘They’re all taking it down in London’). The priest sets off across the Cumbrian fells in pursuit of a young mute woman called Bulmer, who has run off with a local couple’s baby. She is also ‘one of the blighted’: an escapee from the orphanage run by the priest and the victim of unspeakable acts.

Myers’s breakthrough came a few years later with the publication of The Gallows Pole (2017), a novel about a crew of coin clippers – the ‘Cragg Vale Coiners’ – who operated in the Upper Calder Valley in the 18th century. The gang was led by the self-proclaimed ‘King’ David Hartley, a historical figure whom Myers portrays as a charismatic freedom fighter and Northern secessionist. His raggle-taggle band is made up of ‘poor men, proud men’ with nicknames like Young Frosty and Mad Blood, whose surnames ‘were as much a part of the terrain as the boundary marker stones that mapped the moors and fractioned their tight territories from the days of the old wapentake’. Their main adversary, William Deighton, is a tax collector from Halifax who embodies the civilising zeal of the South and thinks of himself as the ‘upholder of the law in an increasingly lawless land’.

The Gallows Pole is narrated in part as a confessional note written by Hartley after his arrest, the archaic misspellings of which sometimes make him sound like a prophetic leader and sometimes like the BFG. ‘The wherefores and the howabouts of the serky stansums of how this magikal man of metal did fynd his way to us,’ he remarks of a coining expert who joins the gang, ‘is a story unto itself.’ The rest of the novel is written in the stark third person Myers deployed in Beastings, with dialogue that tends towards written-for-TV explication: ‘I actually thought this fellow might be one of your hill-top evaders that I’ve been hearing so much of … those that dare deface the coin of the realm. They can’t be making things any easier for you.’ (The Gallows Pole was adapted for the BBC by Shane Meadows in 2023.)

Myers has been celebrated as a nature writer – his non-fiction book Under the Rock (2018) is an account of discovering the joys of West Yorkshire’s wild places – and many of these early novels hinge on moments in which characters are shocked out of the squalid violence of their lives by encounters with overwhelming natural beauty. One of the few times Bulmer experiences any solace in Beastings is when she retreats to an ‘evergreen plantation of firs, pines and spruces’ before inadvertently taking magic mushrooms and going for a swim in a lake. Just before the climax of Pig Iron, John-John takes a girl to his ‘green cathedral’, a clearing in a wood by the side of a hill which is his ‘special place. My mental escape. My fortress of solitude.’ The breathless lyricism of these descriptions is offset by moments of slightly schlocky body horror: the ‘bubble and foam and fizz’ of a corpse rotting in the gibbet, or the thud and squelch of river stones smashing into wet flesh. In Pig Iron the tape recording of a puppy being dismembered is played back to its devastated owner. At the end of Beastings, the baby that Bulmer snatched is burned to death in a fireplace. As she puts her hands in the flames to try to save it they become ‘spent candles dripping skin’. That some of these events are improbable – would a gang of teenagers really have the foresight to record their torturing, especially in a pre-mobile phone age? Does burning flesh drip? – doesn’t stop them being disturbing, even if it sometimes feels as though Myers is piling on the savagery to allay any charges of being too soft.

After The Gallows Pole Myers seemed to lose his taste for operatic ultra-violence. Of his last few books The Offing has been the most successful, especially in Germany, where it sold more than 300,000 copies and won a major prize. It’s not hard to understand why readers took to it. The Offing is a feelgood novel narrated retrospectively by Robert Appleyard, a ‘slight wandering lad from the ash-coloured coalfields’ who sets out one day in 1946 on a walk through ‘Northern England, the greenest land there ever was, so pungent and lush it could make a young man dizzy’. On his travels he encounters an eccentric bohemian called Dulcie Piper who lives in a ramshackle house above Robin Hood’s Bay. Dulcie is friends with Noël Coward and knows about wine, literature and the names of plants. Over the course of a long summer she introduces Robert to good food and the writing of D.H. Lawrence, and makes mawkish statements like ‘books are just paper, but they contain within them revolutions.’ She also tells him about her former lover, a German Jewish poet called Romy Landau who fled Germany before the war and later drowned herself in the North Sea, leaving behind a manuscript of unpublished poems. After Robert persuades Dulcie to publish the manuscript, Landau comes to be celebrated as a forgotten modernist genius. In the process Dulcie is released from her grief, just as Robert is freed from the constraints of his provincial upbringing. Armed with a new awareness of the possibilities of life beyond the coalfields, he becomes a novelist and is heralded by London publishers as an ‘angry new voice’.

One problem with this is that – at least on the evidence quoted in The Offing – neither Landau nor Robert are very good writers. Landau’s poem ‘Unmothering’, which strikes Robert ‘like a fencepost rammer’ when he first reads it, goes:

A womb awaits
What?
Nothing but a
child;
a birth-machine you are
not.

This is more Rupi Kaur than Hope Mirrlees. As for Robert, you can tell he’s a writer because he likes alliteration – ‘the tired tides chipped away at the shortening cliff line with the dull repetition of a mason’s mallet’ – but you might conclude that he’s not a very attentive one because he misuses ‘disinterested’ and ‘fulsome’, and often mangles his metaphors (‘Art was an attempt to preserve the amber of the moment’).

Since The Offing, Myers has largely continued in this wholesome vein. The Perfect Golden Circle (2022) is a genial romp about two friends who enjoy making crop circles together; Rare Singles (2024), which has a bit more bite, is about a widowed singer from Illinois called Bucky Bronco who travels to Scarborough to perform his only hit at a Northern Soul night. Cuddy (2023), a sweeping history of the afterlife of Cuthbert – a medieval saint whose body is now interred in Durham Cathedral – is more formally ambitious; it’s composed of short stories, quotations from historical accounts and fragmentary poems.

Jesus Christ Kinski – the title sounds like a posh man shouting at his dog – might seem more of a departure than it really is. The bulk of the novel consists of an extended monologue written from the perspective of Klaus Kinski during a performance of his one-man show about the life of Christ – the last of a ‘disastrous run of self-financed theatrical monologues’ – in front of thousands of people at the Deutschlandhalle in West Berlin in November 1971. Bolted onto this there’s a meandering autofictional essay. In his narrow house on a gloomy hillside the narrator thinks about the commercial folly of the novel he is writing, worries about money and the meaning of art, frets about his mental health and gives a potted overview of his career.

Most of the Kinski sections are written in a haranguing second-person voice, the patter of a fire and brimstone sermon mixed with a choose-your-own-adventure story. ‘No, you must not let yourself be used by such leeches, louses and lickers of dirty arseholes,’ Kinski thinks. ‘You wanted to feel free. And compromise is as disgusting a word as feminism.’ Other parts take on the typographic fragmentation of Cuddy, in which the font size gradually grew smaller in places, making it feel as if you were at the optician. Photographs of Kinski’s show are scattered throughout the book. In his dressing room before the performance Kinski imagines his critics ‘gathering like jackdaws on a telegraph wire’, their ‘little pricks already getting stiff at the thought of tomorrow’s assassination’. He remembers his sometime collaborator Werner Herzog, a ‘worthless, simpering piece of rat shit’. His monologue is interspersed with aphorisms, each printed separately on a single page, offering wisdom like ‘A caged animal can never forget the freedom of the wilderness’ and ‘I am a genius, you piece of shit!’

Myers’s novel certainly captures the sneering disdain of its subject, at least as it was recorded in Kinski’s memoir, All I Need Is Love, a stream of invective, perversion and violence that was withdrawn soon after it was released in English in 1988 and eventually published as Kinski Uncut in 1996. In it Kinski described an impoverished childhood (which Herzog later said was largely invented), and the incestuous relationships he claimed to have had with his mother, sister and daughters. When it was published his daughter Nastassja sued him for libel. In 2011, twenty years after his death, his eldest daughter, Pola, released her own memoir in which she accused Kinski of sexually abusing her between the ages of five and nineteen.

The essayistic sections of Jesus Christ Kinski amount to something of a reckoning with Kinski’s monstrousness, as well as providing a justification for the book we are reading. During the Covid lockdowns, the narrator-writer says, he became obsessed with the YouTube footage of Kinski performing his monologue. He had long been fascinated with Kinski because ‘he himself had a self-sabotaging streak, which often resulted in him derailing his own creative endeavours.’ In his view Kinski’s performance was ‘every bit as potent as any mythologised rock’n’roll performance or art happening’, whereas today art has lost its shock value:

the younger generation didn’t want to witness bad behaviour, they wanted artists who were ‘relatable’ and whose words, music and actions reflected their own anxieties. They wanted people who were nice and non-threatening and only low-level sexy. No danger. Nothing too extreme … Or, viewed another way, for the first time in a century, children in the Western world had become more boring than their parents.

Kinski is in some respects the archetypal Myers character: a charismatic, morally compromised figure fully committed to the dangerous, life-altering power of art. He has David Hartley’s megalomania, the charisma of Mac in Pig Iron, the paranoid intensity of the priest in Beastings. Yet even if this narrative can be understood as a kind of ironised or exaggerated performance, the justification of literature and art it provides – what it might be for, why one might wish to create it – feels both underwhelming and slightly evasive. At one point the narrator says that writers serve ‘little practical purpose beyond documenting the here and now in only slightly better grammar than those doing exactly that on social media’. Writing is ‘a series of snap decisions … arranged in an agreeable and digestible sequence using only 26 letters and a few other characters deployed to denote the passing or pausing of time. Nothing too complicated.’

This arbitrariness is also apparent when the narrator tries to account for the success of The Offing in Germany: ‘Why he had made the poet German when she could just as easily have been Spanish or Japanese or Peruvian the writer couldn’t quite fathom, only that this was a decision he had made after no more than ten seconds of consideration.’ Romy Landau might be a near anagram of ‘randomly’, but Myers must know, having written more than a dozen novels, that there are no coincidences in fiction, or that if there are, it’s usually bad fiction. If he really doesn’t know why he decided to make Landau German, then I do: it’s because a German Jewish poet driven to suicide by the nightmare of 20th-century history is a far more potent vehicle for pathos than a Peruvian or Japanese poet would be. (The fact that she also has a cameo in Rare Singles, name-checked by a German journalist who interviews Bucky, suggests her nationality can’t be all that arbitrary.)

The Offing is a novel built almost entirely around the image of a promising creative life being destroyed by fascism. The idea that the poetry Landau left behind somehow made her death, if not worthwhile, then at least explicable, seems overwhelmingly sentimental, melodramatic and – yes – a bit twee. Kinski presents a similar problem. Myers’s Christology is founded on the sense of scandal, shock and outrageousness that Kinski, as a subject, brings with him. As he rants and struts about the stage, the crowd boo him and call him a fascist. He curses them, claiming they are unworthy of his art. ‘I would have been better than Adolf Hitler,’ he thinks. ‘I could have delivered his speeches a lot better, that’s for certain.’ You could describe such posturing as rock’n’roll swagger. You could also call it a persecution complex.