Claire Fuller is an author whose career I have followed from the beginning. I love her insightful prose, and find that all of her novels have stuck with me, even years after I picked them up. I was so excited, therefore, to read her newest offering, Unsettled Ground.
The protagonists of this novel are 51-year-old twins, Jeanie and Julius Seeder, who ‘have always been different from other people’. They live in ‘rural isolation and poverty’ with their mother, Dot, in a small decrepit cottage in the Wiltshire countryside, and have been shielded from a lot during their lives. When Dot suddenly dies at the outset of the novel, ‘threats to their livelihood start raining down’, and Dot’s deep web of secrets begins to unravel.

Fuller makes us constantly aware of the poverty in which Jeanie and Julius live. She writes of a long-broken window in their barn which nobody has fixed; the lack of education given to Jeanie as ‘an education for the king of people they were – poor people, country people – would only steal her away from where she belonged – at home’; and the payment of their mother’s funeral, which is so far away from what they can afford.
I love how detailed Fuller’s descriptions are throughout, and how consistent they are. As Dot opens the door on the morning of her death, she: ‘… watches her hand grasping the wrought iron, the liver spots and crosshatching seeming peculiar, unlike anything she’s seen before: the mechanics of her fingers, the way the skin on her knuckles stretches over bone, bending around the handle. The articulation is alien – the hand of an impostor.’ After Dot dies, and her body is resting at home, Fuller writes: ‘Since Dot has been in the parlour, the feel of the cottage is different, the air denser, her and her brother’s actions slower, as though they were moving through smoke, feeling their way with their hands outstretched in a house that once was familiar.’
Unsettled Ground is an impressive novel the pen of a highly perceptive author. I am struck, with each of Fuller’s novels, by the way in which she instinctively knows her characters; every single one springs to life, fully formed. Fuller is aware of the complexities of their emotions, and the way in which they flare and settle. She is also incredibly strong at weaving together different storylines, which all come together wonderfully at the novel’s climax. Unsettled Ground intrigued me throughout, and I found myself really moved by Jeanie and her plight; her vulnerabilities become more and more obvious as the novel progresses, and I felt for her deeply.
Unsettled Ground is not a happy story in any sense of the word. The characters are buffeted against such sadness and discomfort throughout, and an entirely fitting bleak atmosphere suffuses the whole. I did not find a lot of the plot here surprising, but for me, that was not the point. I was interested in the characters, and how they interacted with one another. Unsettled Ground is a transporting novel, a tender story about two lost people rallying against the circumstances in which they have found themselves. It is not my favourite of Fuller’s novels – and, to be honest, I do not think anything will beat the exquisite Swimming Lessons for me – but I thoroughly enjoyed it.