SWIMMING IN UNCERTAINTY
Novelist Claire Fuller likes to keep readers (and herself) guessing
“Gil Coleman looked down LONDON from the first-floor window of the bookshop and saw his dead wife standing on the pavement below.”
That’s the opening sentence of Claire Fuller’s new novel, Swimming Lessons — and yes, it’s an attention-grabber.
But where was this award-winning English novelist planning to go with it? Well, there lies the rub, as Hamlet used to say.
“With this one, I really didn’t know how it was going to end,” Fuller acknowledges with a laugh.
Indeed, halfway through the writing of Swimming Lessons, published in Canada by Anansi, she was still uncertain as to where she wanted to take it. “And after my first draft, the second one changed a lot.”
Fuller is a novelist full of surprises. She never intended to be a writer — she wanted to be a sculptor. Amazon U.K. may have named her its rising literary star in 2015, yet she figures she’s still learning her craft and therefore regularly contributes a short piece of fiction to an online site whose members evaluate each other’s work. She’s also part of a support group for writers who are slow starters and don’t get published until they’re over the age of 40.
Meanwhile, what about Swimming Lessons? Some readers have surprised her by seeing it as a psychological thriller.
“It’s not meant to be,” she says over the phone from her home in Winchester. “I very much think of it as a straight novel.”
It’s not the first time she’s been hit with the “thriller” tag. The Times of London hailed her first book, Our Endless Numbered Days, a harrowing account of a child kidnapping, as “a grown-up thriller of a fairy tale, full of clues, questions and intrigue.”
Intrigue also permeates Swimming Lessons, a novel in which the mysterious disappearance of a wife and mother still haunts family members 12 years later. Gil is the husband, an aging academic, whose glimpse of Ingrid, the wife he believed dead, leads to a serious injury. Nan and Flora are the two grown daughters who return home to care for him.
At this point, the past begins hovering ominously over the present.
The emotionally fragile Flora, still haunted by her mother’s disappearance, renews her quest to discover what really happened — with unexpected consequences. The answers she seeks have long lain buried in the pages of her ailing father’s huge book collection. They are letters written by Ingrid to Gil about the true state of their marriage — letters never sent but instead hidden away. In the novel, the contents of those letters run counterpoint to the present-day narrative.
Despite Fuller’s willingness to take “the high dive” and deny herself the security of careful advance plotting, Swimming Lessons did have one constant — the letters.
“They were the inspiration that got the book started,” she says. “Before my husband and I lived together we would write notes to each other and hide them in each other’s house. And when he was packing up to move in with me, he kept finding these notes I had written to him — hidden in his books and all sorts of things. It was all quite romantic because they were little love letters.”
One wouldn’t call Ingrid’s letters in the novel romantic. Rather, they chronicle the disintegration of a once promising marriage to a selfish, philandering husband.
“But I didn’t know how it was going to end,” Fuller reiterates. “Halfway through I was still saying to myself — is Ingrid alive or is she dead? I still was discovering the real truth in the same way Flora does.”
So is Swimming Lessons a thriller? Fuller may resist the label, but she also believes in allowing the reader to make up his or her own mind.
“I think it’s very important that you leave gaps in a book, so that the reader can use his or her own imagination. Readers can then connect much more strongly with it because they can create images and questions and answers in their own head.”
But Fuller also believes in maintaining a compelling narrative line — which is why Anansi publisher Sarah MacLachlan (not to be confused with the singer) calls Swimming Lessons “a deliciously suspenseful, brilliantly plotted novel.”
Meanwhile Fuller, whose debut book won Britain’s coveted Desmond Elliott Prize, remains startled by her sudden literary success. Growing up, it never occurred to her that she might become a writer.
“I wanted to be a sculptor,” she emphasizes. “And I was one for a little while, but it’s even harder to make a living as a sculptor than as a writer.”
She didn’t realize her possibilities in the latter field until her local public library hosted an event where aspiring writers signed up to create “a five-minute short story, which you would then read aloud to a paying audience.”
That launched Fuller’s literary journey, but she’s still conscious of how greatly her visual-arts background influences her writing.
“I do know that the art I’ve created in the past happened in the same way as my books — without a plan. I have some huge piece of stone and some vague idea there’s going to be a figure in all this. But it’s not until I’m actually carving that something happens and I think — maybe I’ll go this way rather than that way.”
Fuller played an active role in forming Prime Writers, a support group dedicated to writers who didn’t publish their first novel until they were over 40. And she has a message for other aspiring late starters — believe in what you’re doing.
“It is very hard to carry on writing a novel when you have no idea whether it will be published. But keep going. Make sure you finish what you start.”