“Unsettled Ground” by Claire Fuller
Reading Time: 4 minutes
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The Book Oversimplified
Unsettled Ground is a beautiful and heart-wrenching tale of survival and disillusionment. Julius and Jeanie’s world shatters when their mother Dot dies, leaving them in a house they can’t keep nor pay for; without jobs, or money, or phones, or bank accounts and, most of all, without any explanation about why their life turned out to be the way it is.
Quotes
“Perhaps this is how it happens: eventually, after every activity has been carried out at least once without Dot’s presence—the potting of tomatoes, the making of a rabbit pie, the playing of each song—Jeanie will no longer notice that her mother is gone. She isn’t sure this is what she wants.”
“...she is from a different world where lost things are found and ill people survive.”
“‘In the end it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.’”
A Review Through Takeaways
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021 and winner of the Costa Novel Award 2021, Unsettled Ground is one of the books I was supposed to read last year but, unfortunately, got lost in the thousands of things I had to prepare before the arrival of my firstborn. It took me almost eight months, but in the end, I picked it up and—oh boy—I’m glad I did.
Set in rural England, Unsettled Ground tells the story of Jeanie and Julius, two 51 years old twins in the aftermath of their mother’s sudden death. What’s interesting, though, is the set of challenges that will shake their understanding of who their parents were and who they’ve become as a consequence. Julius is a handyman without a proper job, he doesn’t drive and has no idea about how to make the most of the little money he earns. Jeanie can grow vegetables and cook and care for the cottage where they live, rent-free, but doesn’t work and she can’t read.
Their life has gone practically unchanged since their dad passed away almost forty years prior, shielded from the entanglements of society by Dot, their mother, who had always been judge and executor of everything that happened to her children. Once this curtain of secrets disappears, the reality of their condition floods their days, and both Julius and Jeanie will have to fight to make sense of a world nothing short of alien to them, while being incapable to let go of their pride—which, in some cases, seems to be all they have.
Where can they bury their mother? How will they pay for the funeral? What’s behind their living arrangement, and why Dot’s death has changed it?
With perfect prose, without a single bump in the road, and magical attention to detail, Claire Fuller projects us into the experiences of the marginalised, the ones who must sweat and bleed for what we all take for granted.
The perfect plot for your characters
Reading Unsettled Ground—especially after hearing Claire Fuller’s speech at the Hampshire Writing Society—was like attending a masterclass on point of view. The most obvious cause-effect connections of ordinary life are re-shaped into a compelling mystery when seen from the eyes of Jeanie, who can’t read, has no education and has never been given the chance to make a life for herself.
To me, the book’s plot is the best possible one to make the reader empathise and understand Jeanie’s character.
As a writer, inexperienced and new to the field as I am, I always tend to design my plot first, as if it was an engineering project; paying attention to the pace, the structure, the main points. Of course this is important, but it’s not everything, and when I let myself drown in plot design I often forget to make room for characters.
A much better approach, in my opinion, when you’ve got a marvellous character between your lines—like Jeanie—is to find the story that will make them shine the most.
In the case of Unsettled Ground, Claire Fuller uses the twins’ backstory to push us through the lenses of someone so distant from us she might as well come from another planet. Dot’s secrets would not be secrets if Jeanie and Julius were not Jeanie and Julius, and their challenges would not bring up their pride if they were a smudge less secluded.
Conclusion
It always pays to write about humanity, but it’s a difficult task to handle. I think Unsettled Ground does this better than any other book I picked up in the last few years.
Alla Prossima
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