Sensitive portrayal of troubled siblings
Life-changing events force twins to make their way in a world they’re ill-equipped to navigate
If ever there was a pair of siblings experiencing a failure to launch, it’s 51-year-old Jeanie and Julius, the oddly fascinating twins who make their way through “Unsettled Ground.” This, the fourth novel by British writer Claire Fuller (“Our Endless Numbered Days,” “Swimming Lessons,” “Bitter Orange”), is shortlisted for the U.K.’s prestigious 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Jeanie and Julius have spent their entire lives in impoverished seclusion in rural England with their widowed mother, Dot, who lost her husband decades earlier in a violent accident. The three live hand-to-mouth but quite contentedly, growing their own food and making music together.
In their meagrely furnished mouldering cottage, Dot has kept the twins so reliant on her that even by age 51 they’ve never had close friends or bank accounts, let alone romantic partners or full-time jobs. Julius makes a little beer-and-tobacco money doing occasional handyman chores, while Jeanie gardens. Digging up the first early potatoes every year is her greatest joy.
After Dot dies suddenly of a stroke at the book’s beginning — a tenderly detailed opening scene, witnessed only by
the dog, Maude — the twins are cast adrift. How will they live? How will they even pay for a burial? They check the tin in the scullery where Dot kept all the money: three pounds, 54 pence.
Before they can ponder their next move, threats begin to appear from all sides: debt collectors come to call, taxes are owing, the power is shut off. The twins are bewildered. They’d always thought their beloved cottage came rent-free through an agreement Dot negotiated years before.
But this mother kept secrets from her children and Fuller takes her time revealing them to us. Her pacing is deliberately unhurried as she slowly builds suspense. The siblings are forced to rethink everything they thought was true.
We root for the naive but proud Jeanie, who struggles to get and keep her first job. Meanwhile the quixotic Julius (he wanted to put a yurt on the property to rent out as an Airbnb, despite having no computer or internet) decides to find a girlfriend and get married, a task easier said than done. Their situation lurches from bad to worse, becoming unbearably bleak and so perilous it threatens their very survival.
Several times, just when we think we know how “Unsettled Ground” will unfold, Fuller pulls the rug out from under us, leaving us, too, floundering to find our footing.
Fuller’s prose is often graceful, lyrical. Jeanie listens to Julius playing his violin: “The music flows out of the windows one wavering note at a time, achingly sweet, a pear drop caught in her throat.” There’s a musicality and rhythm even when the author is describing something abhorrent, like the decaying cottage. Jeanie studies “the spot around the window where the plaster was blown, the blooming stains on the walls like great circles of ringworm and the hole in the corner of the ceiling which mice would drop out of, and where they used to catch the water in a bucket when it rained.”
Fuller has a remarkable way of juxtaposing beauty with ugliness, resilience with despair, and her portrayal of these troubled but appealing siblings is as sensitive as it is powerful. “Unsettled Ground” shows us that at any age, the unexpected can trip us up and force us to rewrite not only our present but our past.