Anna North’s fourth book, Bog Queen, is a stranded or braided novel. First “a colony of moss” speaks – or rather, does not speak, but “if such a colony could tell the story of its life”, here’s some of what it might say. Then we have Agnes in 2018, American, tall, awkward, expert in forensic pathology and uncertain about everything else, including much of life in England. And then, in the first person, there is an iron age teenage girl, the druid of her village, riding towards a Roman town with her brother Aesu and friend Crab: “I had been druid for two seasons at that point and everyone said I was doing very well.”

Agnes has a post-doctoral fellowship in Manchester, from which she is summoned to the discovery of a body in a peat bog in Ludlow. The story shadows that of Lindow Man, found by peat harvesters in a bog near Wilmslow in 1984. In this novel, “Ludlow” is a town in which “the steel mill has closed down” leaving nothing but “[a] few shops, a Tesco, a Pizza Express”. It’s “the Gateway to the north” and a bus ride from Manchester. Novelists may of course invent time and place as they see fit, but it’s an odd choice to borrow the location of a bourgeois satellite town of Manchester and give it the name of a pretty medieval market town in the Welsh Marches, with a history that belongs to neither.

Agnes’s weak social skills are balanced by joy in her academic specialism, which allows her to see immediately both that this body is 2,000 years old and that the young woman lived for weeks after her obvious injuries. Her knowledge and instinct for individual living and dead bodies is the strongest element of this uneven novel. She can read the way people move and keep still in ways she can’t read voices and faces, and she cares about particular lives in ways she doesn’t care for ecology or archaeology in general.

People pile in after the discovery of the body: environmentalists who want to save the bog from developers, the niece of a woman whose husband confessed to killing her and dumping the body there 40 years ago, archaeologists seeing a career-making find, but Agnes is the only one primarily concerned with one ancient girl’s life and death. Her own backstory is well told, its American setting as solid as the present-day Manchester/Ludlow is wobbly.

It’s likely that readers without much knowledge of iron age archaeology and bog bodies would find those sections comfortable enough. North builds and sustains a material world vividly and with close attention to the bodily experiences of light, landscape and textiles. The scene where the young druid encounters some of the power and goods of the Roman empire is memorable. But even from a position of amateur enthusiasm more than expertise, I’m distracted by oddities in this world: distinctly modern shame at a pregnancy outside “marriage”; archaeologists speculating that those who put the bodies in the bog intended them to be found later, when there is widespread evidence that many were taken from bogs, kept indoors and put back several times over centuries. There’s always an interesting question about the representation of historic and prehistoric speech and worldview, and no correct answer, but North’s solutions are unthinkingly modern in ways that Sarah Hall’s, for example, are not.

The extent to which it’s possible for fiction to voice or represent the lives of plants and animals is important to many modern writers whose thinking includes environmental crisis. The risk is anthropomorphism, and the disclaimer at the top of each section that “a colony of moss does not” imagine/narrate/remember whatever it then goes on to do is not enough to avoid the error. North’s mossy chorus is little more than a projection of human eco-anxiety, in the same way that her iron age story doesn’t step far from the assumptions and traditions of 21st-century America, and her mash-up of English cities and towns doesn’t recognise the specificities of place and time. Bog Queen could be, and occasionally is, beautifully strange, but overall, imagination and research don’t reach far enough.

Box office earnings in October have crashed to levels not seen since the late 1990s, with Halloween weekend becoming the worst of the year so far.

According to a report in Variety, cinema takings for October in North America totalled $425m (£323m), the lowest figure since October 1997, when it was $385m – not counting October 2020, when North American cinemas only took $63m as moviegoing was severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A number of factors have been blamed for the poor results. Notably, there was a paucity of putative blockbusters, with the only large-scale effects movie on release being Tron: Ares, which took $67m in North America, as part of a disappointing $133m worldwide gross against its $180m reported budget.

Also disappointing was the performance of so-called “awards season” films, with Dwayne Johnson wrestling movie The Smashing Machine, Julia Roberts #MeToo drama After the Hunt, and music biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere all grossing less than expected.

The end of October customarily delivers a boost from horror movies, but with the date of Halloween falling on a Friday, when a large section of the intended audience would be otherwise occupied, box office receipts for the weekend of 31 October to 2 November were the lowest of the year, with a total of $48.3m. Also contributing to the disappointment was the absence of any successful horror releases: the leading horror release of the season, Black Phone 2, managed $8m over the Halloween weekend, while the putatively buzzy Shelby Oaks performed poorly, taking just $770,000 from its relatively significant release in more than 1,700 theatres.

Cinemagoing over the Halloween weekend in North America was also affected by the climax of baseball’s World Series, which finished in the early morning of 2 November.

Box office analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations told Variety: “The major releases this month failed to deliver. Simple as that.”

He added: “Apart from the moderately successful Black Phone 2, there just weren’t enough horror films to entice moviegoers. That should be a no-brainer.”

The news wasn’t all bad though: Taylor Swift’s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl saw huge activity on its only weekend in cinemas, taking $34m between 3 and 5 October .

Never in living memory has the north of England felt so far removed from the economic and political power base of London. That the most – the only? – prominent northern accent in the House of Commons currently belongs not to a sitting MP but to the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, speaks volumes about the complete disenfranchisement of northern influence in how Britain is currently run.

Step forward then Andy Burnham, a one-time potential Labour party leader who wisely recognised that making significant change within Westminster is often a thwarted and thankless task, survivable only by the biggest egos or the borderline psychopathic. However, as mayor of Greater Manchester he has rolled up his sleeves and dug deep into local politics and community policy making, and consequently proven himself to be that increasingly rare breed in the 2020s: a genuinely popular politician. Some still consider him to be a possible future PM, and with Head North he certainly stakes a claim as an individual with a clear vision not yet jaded by three decades in the cesspit of politics.

For many northerners, arguably the only thing more annoying than a train infrastructure that no longer works is the fact that they are continuously compelled to defend their region; the chips that are carried on shoulders have been put there by circumstance rather than choice. Take, for example, the 2010-2015 coalition government’s “northern Powerhouse” proposal to boost the economy. In fact, by 2019, 200,000 more northern children were living in poverty as a result of £3.6bn in spending cuts (versus a spending increase of £4.7bn in the south-east and south-west). And as for HS2, Rishi Sunak cancelled the crucial phase 2, which would have speedily linked the north to London and an increasingly distant Europe beyond.

Joining forces with metro mayor of the Liverpool city region Steve Rotheram, who was born just three miles away from him, Burnham interrogates such examples of neglect towards the north while offering a clear plan to improve living standards.

Though from different backgrounds – Rotheram was one of eight children and a bricklayer, while Burnham was at Cambridge – the pair were both politicised by close proximity to the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, and the false narrative that depicted Liverpudlians as perpetrators in the same decade that this internationally minded city was being put into managed decline. Little wonder the pair bonded over their outsiders’ distrust of Westminster, and have no problem calling Thatcher “the devil incarnate” today.

They’re also quick to correct the common misconception that “pro-north” equals “anti-London”, not least because Burnham ascended during New Labour’s glory years; though after some persuasion from Rotheram, he broke from Blair/Brownite consensus to ultimately return north, with the pair occupying newly created mayoral roles in 2017. Burnham was in at the deep end when Manchester Arena was bombed 14 days after he came to office – he found out from a screaming Rotheram, whose daughters were there: “In an instant I had that same feeling I had in 1989… sick to the pit of my stomach,” Burnham says.

There’s certainly a street-level approachability to the pair that’s sorely lacking in today’s leadership; you can’t imagine anyone in Sunak’s cabinet publishing photos from their 1980s building site days and hanging out with Paul Weller, or citing the June Brides and Boys from the Blackstuff as influences.

Their vision for equality appears workable and deceptively simple, and includes the renationalisation of public transport networks, some long overdue TLC for the NHS and a restructured education system as the engine for social mobility. When the purse strings are held fast by careerists who worship only at the altar of free market capitalism, it still all looks an alarmingly steep uphill struggle. At least Burnham and Rotheram are already proven entities among their constituents, having done positive work in tackling homelessness, public transport issues and fighting Boris Johnson for furlough funding during Covid, despite their entire delegation being muted on governmental Zoom calls. “I could just smell the bullshit,” writes Rotheram, whose commitment to his city was evident in his attendance at more than 2,000 events in one year, when Liverpool was the EU-funded capital of culture.

Their tangential career narratives also suggest that if the likes of Johnson and Farage can trade on their contrived “man down the pub” personas, then Burnham and Rotheram should be afforded serious consideration by those who prefer their representatives to be present, and whose politics are born of experience rather than privilege.

Not since Tony Blair 30 years ago have politicians advocated for the north from a place of understanding, while also acknowledging that there is no actual single “north”, there are infinite versions, and to view it as a homogeneous left-leaning, working-class, cloth-capped entity would be the same reductive thinking that has fuelled 14 years of Conservative punishment beatings. Go to Rochdale, to Middlesbrough or Blackpool to witness such economic discrimination.

Overseen by journalist Liam Thorp, who brings brevity and order, Head North ultimately offers hope to the northern regions when it is most needed, and reminds us that those politicians who refuse to toe the party line are often those who history remembers most favourably.

Benjamin Myers’s most recent novel, Cuddy (Bloomsbury), won the 2023 Goldsmiths prize

About the author

“A brilliant tour de force. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a detailed, revisionist understanding of the beginnings of the modern refugee regime.”

—Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford

“Magnificent and magisterial. Empire of Refugees not only reveals the emergence of a new template for refugee flows in the modern world, but it also captures the human experiences of the refugees themselves: their sorrows, hopes, failures, and successes. A prodigious achievement.”

—Michael A. Reynolds, Princeton University

“Empire of Refugees is a meticulously researched and imaginatively conceived history of mass migration that represents a genuinely fresh contribution to both late Ottoman history and global refugee studies.”

—Laura Robson, Pennsylvania State University