PECULIAR GROUND
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
(4th Estate)
An enclosed community is toxic,” declares Nell Lane, who
is, by the 1980s, designing prison gardens.
“It festers. It stagnates. The wrong people thrive there.” Three hundred years earlier, one of her predecessors
had similar reservations. Peculiar Ground opens in 1663, with the Earl of Woldingham hiring John Norris to landscape the estate of Wychwood House in Oxfordshire.
A Royalist who was forced into exile during the Civil War, Woldingham makes heartfelt speeches about healing old wounds and leaving differences behind while planning a new kind
of exile in the shape of
a five-mile wall that will encircle his estate.
This opening section, told from a sceptical Norris’s perspective, is intriguing and atmospheric, and the subsequent leap forward
300 years feels abrupt and not a little disappointing.
Suddenly, we find ourselves in 1961, with the current incumbents of the house throwing a weekend-long house party. Parallels,
or continuities, between
the two eras are soon apparent. Like Woldingham, Christopher and Lil Robertson are mourning
a drowned son.
In both centuries, the Roman ruins on the estate, particularly a mosaic floor depicting two young boys forming the shape of a ring, suggest ancient pagan magical traditions are far from extinguished. And in the Rossiters’ time, no less than in Woldingham’s, the local people’s access to
time-honoured rights of way is a contentious issue.
Enclosure, and the relationship between
a land and its people, is the underlying theme, and it’s no coincidence that the 1961 party coincides with the construction of the Berlin Wall, nor that several guests have connections with East Germany.
Here, Hughes-Hallett introduces her extensive cast – one that will have readers continually flipping to the “Dramatis Personae” to
sort out their Flossies, Nells, Chloes and Dickies – and
her handling of their interconnected lives is deft and skilful.
But structurally it feels like a blunder. Having sat through one introductory section, we’re faced with another, less immediately compelling one, featuring a plethora of new characters, just when we’re ready for the story to shift
up a gear. The blow to the novel’s forward momentum detracts from some very adept character work, making the 1961 section feel slow and languid, although it will pay off later.
Further leaps in time follow: to 1973, by which time the house is inhabited by a younger and druggier generation, and to 1989, when the Berlin Wall comes down, but as the division between East and West falls away the Rushdie affair (in which one of the characters
is implicated) opens up
a new wound. Hughes-Hallett navigates the shifting relationships between her characters well, capturing
the melancholy that sets in with age.
Bringing out her first
novel at 65 after several biographies, she impresses with her prescience. Obviously, a novel on this scale must have been
in the planning stages
long before the political upheavals of the last two years, but its concerns are completely of the moment, and she expresses them
with finesse, allowing them to emerge out of subtly interwoven threads.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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