Claire Fuller’s higher ‘Ground’

British writer tackles family and forgiveness in new novel

For many, the idea of starting over begins to fade the older we get. For someone in their 20s, it’s certainly doable, but for someone in their 30s, 40s and beyond, the chances of escaping our hometown, our family, our past, or any other variable that holds us back seems increasingly unlikely the more years that pass.

Julius and Jeanie, the fraternal twin protagonists of Claire Fuller’s rapturous new novel “Unsettled Ground,” are in their early 50s. The concept of a fresh start has never seriously occurred to them, and a life outside of their sequestered, off-the-grid existence in a dilapidated English cottage is a pipe dream at best.

Then the twins’ mother, Dot, dies (not to worry about spoilers, it happens in the first few pages), and Julius and Jeanie are forced to not only confront their sheltered past, but deal with the consequences of all that’s been hidden from them over the years. This includes an impending eviction and the dubious circumstances of how they’ve been able to stay on their land, not to mention the mysterious events surrounding their father’s death when the twins were adolescents.

“They are interesting characters that aren’t often written about, especially in British fiction,” Fuller says from her home in Winchester, England. “Obviously we deal all the time with class and the disparity in class, which is more obvious in England. Who has the money and who doesn’t, who your parents are, where you went to school, and all that stuff. I think those disparities are often amplified in the countryside, because you can’t get away from it. In the city, you can hide and you can be any kind of person, but in the countryside, that disparity is right in your face, especially when it comes to the type of house you live in.”

At once a story about outsiderism and poverty, family and forgiveness, “Unsettled Ground” unfolds patiently and poetically. The book’s greatest strength is the converse ways the twins choose to confront this daunting new world of modern responsibilities. While Jeanie is content to keep living a life resembling how they the twins were raised, Julius sees an opportunity to spread his wings within modern society.

“What will they say about him when he’s gone?,” Fuller writes about Julius in the book. “Lived with his mother, and then his sister. Worked hard, but never made enough money. Never did anything with his life. Never went anywhere.”

The novel’s central heartbreak for both characters, however, is how society has no use for either of them, and almost prefers to keep them at the fringes. The book deals in themes of classism and inequality, but just as it begins to do so, Fuller resists preachy pretense, trusting readers to decide for themselves whether the twins are resilient, stubborn or possibly both.

“I did it in a way that I hope I would approach any character, rich or poor, aristocratic or working class,” Fuller says. “You just have to understand who they are, what their challenges are, and what their history is. I hope that I try to write any character with some understanding of who they are and how they handle their issues, and try to write about them subtly.”

For example, things that seem instinctive and arbitrary to the reader, such as holding a wake or having a bank account, are foreign

and daunting to Jeanie and Julius, and Fuller does well to put the reader in the twins’ proverbial shoes.

“I’m just in the moment when it comes to the writing and trying to understand what that character is feeling,” Fuller says. “They feel real to me when I’m writing them, so I think it’s about just having some empathy — putting myself in someone else’s head.”

It’s surprising to learn that Fuller writes on the fly. Her previous books — such as “Swimming Lessons” and her highly acclaimed 2015 debut, “Our Endless Numbered Days” — seemed meticulously organized. While the story deals in themes of co-dependence and betrayal, “Unsettled Ground” moves at the pace of a slow-boil mystery, with Fuller entrancing readers with highly engrossing twists and turns.

“When it comes to the consequences, I often try to pick the least obvious one,” Fuller says. “I try to think, ‘What will the reader be expecting,’ and then I make sure I don’t deliver that.”

“Unsettled Ground” joins a number of excellent recent novels about twins (Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half,” Kamila Shamsie’s “Home Fire,” and Cathleen Schine’s “The Grammarians,” to name a few), and given Fuller’s excellent take on the interconnectedness of twins, it’s surprising to learn she didn’t do much research when it came to the topic.

“They could’ve just been siblings, but just really close,” says Fuller, who was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction alongside Bennett. “I wanted them — Jeanie and Julius — to be so close that they could imagine each other’s thoughts or finish each other’s sentences. At the point that Dot dies, and then there are suddenly objectives and what they want out of life, they become split. Jeanie begins to see that she can no longer understand what Julius is thinking, and that they are growing apart and that she might lose him.”

Fuller says she’s already working on a first draft of a new novel about a young student who joins an isolated medical trial only to find that, when he reemerges into society, a pandemic had begun. Fuller isn’t sure audience will be keen to relive pandemic life by the time the book is released, but until then, she says she became so invested in the characters of Julius and Jeanie that she’s happy to start over.

“They became completely real to me. Something will happen to me in real life, where I’m so deep into writing the book that I’ll think, ‘I wonder what Jeanie would think of this,’ ” says Fuller. “When the book is finished, I’m very pleased to just let them go.”

“Unsettled Ground” by Claire Fuller (Tin House Books, 2021; 330 pages)

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ADRIAN HARVEY