Each August, Hubby and I spend a long weekend at Edinburgh Fringe festival. A few years ago we saw comedian Simon Evans at Assembly George Square. His stand-up show, the Work of the Devil, began with a rant about identity politics before neatly segueing into a personal revelation: a DNA test had shown him to be half Ashkenazi Jew. It turns out he was donor-conceived in a clinic that was run by a husband and wife where the husband supplied the vast majority of sperm – he is thought to have fathered between 600 and 1,000 children. So in his early fifties, Simon Evans realised the most basic details he took for granted about himself were untrue: the man he called “dad” wasn’t his biological father and he wasn’t an “only” child because he had hundreds of half-siblings.
A shocking discovery; a world turned upside down. This is the stuff Clare Fuller’s Unsettled Ground is made on.
Twins Jeanie and Julius Seeder, 51, live with their mother, Dot, in an isolated, ramshackle cottage owned by farmer Spencer Rawson. Their father, Frank, a farm-hand, had been killed in a freak farming accident the day before his 32nd birthday, when the twins were 12; they witnessed the accident.
Dot is “the keeper of the household income and in charge of all outgoings”. When she dies suddenly of a stroke the twins uncover money problems, debts; life as they know it quickly begins to unravel.
The story has several, complementary strands. Jeanie and Julius’s struggle to keep a roof over their heads is a reminder of how people on the margins can fall victim to destitution and casual cruelty almost overnight. At rock bottom, as Jeanie overcomes her pride and is more open to help from Dot’s friend, Bridget, Rawson, and others, we see the redemptive power of community; how (with help) a life can be re-invented if you have “strong opinions…interesting ideas.” But the real power of the book lies with Jeanie gradually discovering secrets and lies that lead her to realise everything she thought she knew – about her mother, her father, Rawson, her own health even – is untrue.
Unsettled Ground is dark and sad; it is also tender and uplifting; a psychological mystery and a sharply observed exploration of the fragility of life. The novel won the Costa Novel Award in 2021.
Rating: *** Highly recommended
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