~ The Lie of the Land. By Amanda Craig ~
Lottie and Quentin, upper-middle class, inveterate Londoners, find themselves forced to move to rural Devon for a year when they realise they cannot yet afford to divorce and sell the house in London, and can only afford the extremely low rent in somewhere like Trelorn, Devon. Lottie who has a pre-university aged, mixed race son (Xan) in an uncharacteristic one-night stand with a Nigerian man whose name she does not know, and two young daughters with Quentin, has lost her job as an architect, but has to jolly her whole family along when they make the unwelcome move from centre to margins, urban to provincial, from comforts to comparative deprivation.
Quentin, who does not seem to understand why Lottie objects to his chronic adultery or how he has hurt her, is actually moving back to Devon, because that is where he came from, and his parents are still there, though his father (a mildly celebrated poet) is swiftly dying of cancer. Ironically, Quentin resents his father for mistreating his mother, by having had affairs. The ‘incomers’ (that is to say, the local term for anyone joining the community from outside) take a long while before they discover the reason their rent is so low: there is an unsolved mystery of the former tenant, a musician called Randall, who was not just murdered but beheaded there. Their landlord, the Devon-boy-turned-celebrity, Gore Tore, is never seldom present in the first half of the novel, but his influence in the village, through his wife, his building projects, his money, is omnipresent.
This novel is teeming with characters – there is Sally, the health worker, and her two sisters, complete with husbands and a total of eight children and many pets, plus relatives on both sides of Quentin and Lottie’s families, plus Janet the domestic help and her boyfriend and daughter, plus Xan’s local and Polish colleagues and friends in the pie-making factory (Humbles) that he works at, and all their life stories and tribulations, plus the Tore family and the murder mystery. The novel does quite well in marking out privilege and deprivation, opportunities and expectations or lack of based on class differentials, and on London vs the countryside; siting itself very convincingly and resoundingly in intensely and uniquely contemporary British social concerns.
The language is fairly pedestrian, but the context is so resolutely British, and Lottie and Quentin’s original lifestyle so immediately recognisably upper-middle classed, that the familiarity makes this an easy, pleasant read; the kind that if it were music, might be classed as ‘easy listening’. The novel becomes plot driven in the second half, and particularly towards the end, seems to be driven mainly to wind up all the loose ends of its plot lines, losing the original focus on character development and relationships, but is not without interest. It rapidly spins to a close in the last few dozen pages, all the mysteries being brought to light in one fell swoop and coincidental timing for the happily ever after.
There was one particular incident near the end worth mentioning because of its feasibility or lack of: Sally discovers her husband has kept his infertility secret from her, and determined – even though on the wrong side of forty – to have a baby, she asks her sister, Anne, who is a nurse like Sally herself, and a mother of five, for help. Anne, not only agrees to deceive her husband and give his sperm to Sally (and apparently neither see the problematic ethics of this); the sisters apparently manage this with relative ease:
The mechanics of it involve an ovulation kit, a diaphragm and a syringe. Anne’s husband will never know why his wife turned enthusiastically to him in bed one particular morning, or why immediately afterwards, she announced she must dash over to Sally. They are both nurses, pragmatic and practical, and though neither had done this before its straightforward. […] ‘It’s bound not to work the first time,’ Anne says; but it does. Three weeks later, Sally’s periods stop and the test kit shows she is pregnant.” p430.
p430
(This reader is left somewhat incredulous.)
It is not that the novel is too ambitious, not at all; it is just that some authors communicate well enough, able to articulate much to convey even quite complex information well; but have no actual knack for writing, no original turn of mind which would show itself in an interesting approach to framing or else a fresh turn of phrase. Some of Craig’s phrases jar a little, like:
“Wheeling a shrilling trolley round the supermarket,”
p261
Later in the passage, there is the mention of the squeal of the trolley, which is far more apt than a ‘shrilling trolley’. Also, the author is rather poor at ensuring the reader understands who is being spoken of, just due to poor writing style and grammar, and poor control of pronouns. For example:
Even Lottie had admitted to moments of unease, especially at night. She seems lonely despite her family and her new job.
Perhaps this is why she has formed a friendship with Lottie Bredin, who is as tall and tensed as she herself is round and relaxed.
p266
The second ‘she’ in the passage does not refer to the same person as the first she. In fact, in the second ‘she’, Craig is referring to Sally – though from context, it actually technically refers to Lottie. There are many such instances in the novel, often tripping the reader up, because it misleads. The author’s lack of precision and repeated lack of the basic writing ability to handle pronouns detracts from a smooth reading experience. I was going to say this novel is in desperate need of an editor, but at the back, Craig thanks her editor, so it appears the novel did have one – which begs the question as to why still so many textual mistakes remain! This is an uneven read – Craig shows her experience by being able to introduce a vast host of characters, and not lose the reader entirely in the process. But her lack of natural knack for writing (as well as apparently deprivation of access to good editing) rather puts me off seeking more of her novels.
All that said, The Lie of the Land was by no means a bad reading experience. The characters are resonant and mostly quite well sketched out and three dimensional, the depiction of the English class system is accurate and vivid, and the range of ages, genders, status, and backgrounds of characters provide a nice spectrum of view points. However, it is the kind of book one is very glad to only have borrowed and to be able to return to the library, rather than have made any investment in, because it is not the kind of book that one intends to reread.
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