The title of Fuller’s novel itself calls to mind the double-edged sword of rootedness. Threatened with homelessness and hunger, burdened with heartache, the twins are forced on a journey, both inward and outward, that they never would have chosen to take. Searching for farm jobs to pay the rent, Julius is forced to relive the central trauma of his life-the day he witnessed his father’s death under tractor blades when he was twelve years old. Jeanie discovers her mother was in debt, but the money that she borrowed is nowhere to be found. Their wealthy landlord takes back the cottage, handing them an eviction notice with a strange allusion to their mother’s past.
Jeanie and Julius barely have time to mourn their mother before their world falls apart more fully than they ever expected. Unlike the rotting fecundity of Daisy Johnson’s intensely metaphoric Oxford canals in Everything Under, in Unsettled Ground the question of money is always pressing, realistic, and stubbornly ugly.
The cottage is mouse-infested and the meager family savings are kept in a kitchen crock, and yet in its fertile garden there’s enough bounty for Jeanie to feed herself and her brother for a week with no more than £3 worth of store-bought food. However, in contrast to Hadley’s lush English summer, Fuller’s England is damp and bleak.
Shrewd, unsmiling, at times gripping, the novel is a midlife coming-of-age story for two adults once thrust into a grown-up world prematurely.įans of Tessa Hadley, another one of Britain’s bestselling contemporary novelists, will immediately think of her ruminative The Past, also centered on a fragmented family’s cottage in the English countryside. Thus begins Unsettled Ground, award-winning author Claire Fuller’s latest novel, shortlisted for the UK’s 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. If it’s possible for two fifty-one-year-olds to qualify as orphans, these twins-isolated, inhibited, distrustful of outsiders-are that. In a secluded cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside, twins Jeanie and Julius wake up to find their only parent dead on the kitchen floor.
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