The allure of the woods is the heart of Robert Williams’s new novel

The problematic pursuit of the idyllic in our broken world forms the subject of Robert Williams's latest novel.

The silent peace of the forest is what initially attracts the Norton family in Robert Williams’s new novel. iStockphoto / April 2014

Ann and Thomas Norton are at their wits’ end. Their second child, Harriet, won’t stop crying. It’s got to the stage where each of them has to spend at least one night a week in a guesthouse, just so they can get some sleep. Facing “utter defeat”, and with Ann feeling like she’s teetering on the edge of insanity, “she was a hundred grenades and if someone so much as caught her elbow it would trigger an explosion that would kill everyone in distance”, their prayers are finally answered, albeit somewhat unexpectedly.

Driving through the local countryside late one night with the baby bawling in her car seat, Thomas takes a secluded lane through Bleasdale Forest, and there, beneath the heavy canopy of trees, Harriet’s shrieks are stilled. Successive trips prove the forest’s soothing charms as night after night Thomas returns with his daughter under the cover of darkness, and soon the entire family is camping peacefully among the trees at the weekend.

Selling their house and converting an old barn hidden deep in the forest into a family home seems the only logical next step, so Thomas and Ann act as speedily as the enveloping fug of sleep deprivation allows, spurred on by the desperateness of their situation. In just a few months their new home is ready. They move in and a silent peace descends all around them, into which they sink as deeply and as gratefully as into a feather-filled mattress.

Raymond Farren, a cripplingly shy but friendly giant of a man, part-time farm labourer and insomniac, watches the Nortons’ new house take shape each night as he stalks the dense, quiet forest. So too for him Bleasdale is a peaceful sanctuary, a “refuge” from his grotty, damp-riddled terraced house in nearby Etherton, the depressing industrial town where he lives when he’s not working on the land. He hates the “tight streets”, the “buildings crammed together, jimmied up against one another”, but most of all he hates the people, especially his next-door neighbours the Sullivans: the two rabble-rousing teenage daughters and their always-arguing mother and father. Keith Sullivan, we’re told, is “a man who expected more from life”. There are the dissatisfied who do something about their lot, and there are those who don’t. Keith belongs resolutely in the latter category; a man most at home languishing in prison, getting blind drunk down the pub or beating up his wife. But even for a man like him, Bleasdale apparently offers him something he wants.

Eight years pass, and the Nortons settle into the peace and quite of the forest. After the initial euphoria of uninterrupted nights of sleep, Ann struggles to feel at home in the “gloomy emptiness” that surrounds her. The children, however, are “settled and rooted” (Harriet having grown into a content, near model child), and Thomas too adapts incredibly quickly to his new surroundings – “The longer they spent in Bleasdale, the more its boundaries seemed to become Thomas’s boundaries” – and finds a kindred spirit in Raymond, the two striking up a delicate friendship.

Then one day there’s a knock at the Nortons’ front door and four masked men force their way into their house and their lives. Thomas had always believed “the further away from towns and cities, the safer you were”, but now he realises the “vulnerability in their remoteness”. In this violent breach of Bleasdale’s branched barricades, the very worst of the world beyond the forest comes crashing into their home and the Nortons must learn to live in the aftermath of the trauma, in “the dark and the glory” of life, side by side.

Like the calm, heavy silence of Bleasdale Forest itself, there's something magnetic about Into the Trees that pulls you firmly into the narrative's embrace and haunts you long after you've turned the final page. A strikingly modern pastoral, it's a novel that hums with mythic resonance, exploring powerful and pertinent themes – how one finds peace amid the chaos of existence, the notion of the rural idyll in today's increasingly urban world, how people set about getting what they want and need in life – grappling near effortlessly with these issues but never losing sight of the believability of its characters or narrative along the way.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.