Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller
Unsettled Ground is Claire Fuller’s fourth novel. Each of them has been relatively different in intent and structure.
Her 2015 debut, the Desmond Elliott Prize winning, Our Endless Numbered Days, was inspired by an incident in 2011 where a teenage boy turned up in Berlin claiming to be British and having been living off grid with his father in the forest. He said that his father had died and that he had buried him in the forest. He was unable to lead the authorities to the burial site and was later discovered being from the Netherlands, older and having had made the whole story up. Fuller took from this the idea of a father and daughter living remotely isolated in a forest in Germany, cut off from all contact with the outside world, spinning a psychologically dark and disturbing tale.
Her second novel, Swimming Lessons published in 2017, is set closer to her Winchester home on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. It is structured around two narratives. One is centred on the younger of Gil and Ingrid’s two daughters, Flora, and is told in an omniscient third person. The other is epistolary, taking the form of a series of letters written by Ingrid addressed to Gil and left secreted in ironically appropriately titled books in his library. They are written over the course 1992, the year Ingrid goes missing, leaving ten-year-old Flora with the central traumatic incident that shapes her life. Twelve years later she returns to Dorset when her father takes ill and there are reports that her mother has been seen. There is a gravity-like force generated by the narcissistic monster that is husband and father Gil, the pull of which keeps this novel’s characters in closely bound orbits.
2018’s Bitter Orange has qualities of the Gothic, particularly in the locale, a creepy derelict country house, Lyntons (modelled on The Grange at Northington, not far from Winchester). There is, as well, hidden ‘treasure’, fabulist stories spun by a mad ‘wife’, and thwarted sexual desire. It is 1969, middle-aged Frances Jellico’s over-bearing mother has just died, finally freeing her to start living her own life. She blags her way into a job cataloguing the garden ornaments and features within the overgrown grounds of Lyntons. Accommodation is in the barely habitual house itself, the place where she joins Peter, who is surveying the building and its contents for the new owner, and his girlfriend Cara. As summer progresses the relations between the three begins to spiral out of control.
Unsettled Ground, out 28 January 2021, is set in the present. The locale is the Wiltshire countryside bordering on Berkshire. The novel opens with the sudden death of twins Jeanie and Julius’ mother. This occurs in the rented farm cottage that the twins have lived their entire 51 years of life. They lead circumscribed lives of rural poverty that would not be out place in Thomas Hardy’s late nineteenth century. This is life at a subsistence level, sustained by what Jeanie and her mother can grow in the garden and the odd jobs Julius manages to find in the neighbourhood. They have been kept in a childlike state of dependence by their mother ever since the death of their father. Now with their mother’s passing their lives are thrown into turmoil as the outside modern world pushes in on them and a hidden past must be confronted.
These four disparate novels share two themes in common.
The first is the unusual or uncomfortable nature of domiciles featured. Houses in Fuller’s novels are never merely anodyne places of residence. Although the occasional urban townhouse or ‘right to buy’ council house will make an appearance, they serve only to provide contrast to the oddness of the main locale of the story.
There is the abandoned and forgotten hunter’s hut, miles from any road or other dwelling in Our Endless Numbered Days. A place that might suffice, barely, as emergency shelter becomes the protagonist’s home for ten years.
The family home in Swimming Lessons is a converted swimming pavilion on the shoreline. It is a place never designed to be a home, full to the brim, and then some, with books.
Bitter Orange’s crumbling, barely habitable mansion is a malign presence in the best Gothic tradition. Anyone who’s seen even just a few horror movies would know better than to spend a night there let alone a whole summer.
The farm cottage in Unsettled Ground, is presented as practically unchanged and un-improved (there is electricity and a bit of plumbing) since its origins in the 19th (18th?) century. Later, a derelict caravan hidden away in a copse between a rubbish strewn bit of wasteland and a busy road features importantly in the story.
The other connecting theme is centrality of parent child relationships in Fuller’s plots. These can push past the usual dysfunctional fare found in many novels, into the pathological.
Qualifying for that, certainly, would be an eight-year-old girl taken by her father to remote location and kept entirely cut off from the world for a decade, as in Our Endless Numbered Days.
The familial relationships in Swimming Lessons and Bitter Orange are a bit more in the dysfunctional ‘norm’. Still, in the former, the loss her mother at an early age and her father’s nearly total self-involvement, has made Flora neurotic almost to the point of dis-association. In Bitter Orange, Frances’ mother, by way of the all-encompassing demands on her daughter’s loyalty and attention, has left her so out of step with the world and so hopeless at reading other people that there is an inevitability to the tragedy that ensues.
In Unsettled Ground, twelve-year-old Jeanie and Julius are witnesses to a terrifying event. The initial trauma and the story that, over the years, grows around this event, blights their lives. Their devastated mother eventually recovers some equilibrium but then endeavours, with a fair degree of success, to keep her children close and in a kind of stasis. They are, essentially, stuck at the age of twelve. Like the middle-aged Frances in Bitter Orange, the mother’s death frees them, finally, to grow up. To now, at 51 years of age, go through the difficult transition from a state of dependence to adulthood. And, as in Bitter Orange, this does not bode well.
In all her novels Claire Fuller excels in creating vivid and convincing locations and scenery that add immeasurably to nuanced depth and psychological reality of her already well written characters.
Our Endless Numbered Days, Swimming Lessons and Bitter Orange are published in the UK by Fig Tree Penguin and by Tin House in the USA. They are all available to purchase in paperback.
Unsettled Ground will be published in 2021 (25 March in the UK) in hardcover by the same publishers as above.
It is available to pre-order in the UK from Waterstones