It was thrilling to see Claire Fuller's “Unsettled Ground” recently listed on this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. I've read and admired all of her novels ever since her debut “Our Endless Numbered Days”. Fuller's settings are typically in remote locations and this new novel primarily revolves around a cottage on a rural farm and country estate. Twins Jeanie and Julius are 51 years old and have lived here their whole lives with their mother Dot. But when Dot dies at the very beginning of the novel these sheltered adults struggle to manage the practical difficulties of keeping the cottage, paying the debt their mother has left behind and determining how their lives will continue going forward. Gradually family secrets are uncovered as their impoverished situation becomes increasingly dire. It's a heartrending story, but also a compassionate portrait of individuals not often represented in fiction.
Jeanie's life has been fairly harmonious up until this point keeping her garden, playing music and enjoying the steady companionship of her family. But there's also a danger to this insular pastoral lifestyle because now she's a middle-aged woman who has never had a paid job and who can only read at an extremely rudimentary level. It's moving the way we follow her uneasy steps in trying to adjust to living in the larger world and how she falls into desperate circumstances. She also has a wonderfully creative side and musical talent. Fuller incorporates the lyrics of a number of folk songs into the text. Using a lot of richly-imagined atmospheric detail, the story vividly portrays how she connects with the natural world more than people. As someone uneasy in social situations and who possesses a lot of pride she also struggles to accept help when it's offered to her. This is portrayed so sympathetically and realistically that I felt a great amount of compassion for her so it's very tense how the story plays out.
I'm someone who really values stability and is generally resistant to change. But it's unrealistic to expect that things can always stay the same and the novel suggests how we limit the possibilities of life by sticking too closely to our own familiar circumscribed realm of experience. Julius describes how “Sometimes, I reckon, we need something to come along and trip us up when we're not expecting it. Otherwise, one day we're kids playing with the hose pipe, and the next we're laid out on an old door in the parlour.” It's harrowing how the story traces the development of people who are so firmly set in their ways and how they seek a new form of independence. It's also interesting the way the novel approaches memory and how we have to radically readjust our sense of self when we learn new life-altering information about the past. At one point it's stated 'It is hard to rewrite your own history.” So I found it compelling how the book approaches the idea of rewriting not only the future we were expecting but the past we thought we understood. This is such an original and poignant story unlike any I've read before.
