When, in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921), the young poet Denis Stone breakfasts with the hard-of-hearing Jenny Mullion, she disregards his question about her night’s sleep, starting instead with thunderstorms. “Parallel straight lines meet only in infinity”, Denis reflects sourly as his companion discusses the importance of lying down during lightning strikes in order to be safely “out of the current”. “We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most.”
If we are all indeed, to varying extents, parallel straight lines, then the couple at the centre of Thomas McMullan’s Groundwater might have been drawn with a ruler. The tone is set in the first pages:
“I saw a baby deer,” he said.
… Her first instinct was to welcome [his words] with a smile, not taking the meaning but thinking instead of the cupboard door by her hips that would only close when lifted.
And it continues throughout. Here, a “silver ripple” passes behind an eye; there, a “chest tighten[s]”. Rarely do these sentiments, as McMullan puts it, “cross the line into language”.
The pair in question – the struggling translator John and the struggling writer-cum-project manager Liz – have plenty to discuss. They have been trying fruitlessly to conceive, there are simmering resentments about money, and John feels that they are drifting apart. “When the right moment came, he would ask her what had happened, what he had done.” That moment never comes. Anxieties are displaced by haunting, dreamlike sequences in which the couple moves silently around and across a lake encountering an assortment of increasingly unsettling jetsam, from a hobby horse to a waterlogged concertina.
Like McMullan’s debut novel, The Last Good Man (TLS, December 18 & 25, 2020), which won the Betty Trask prize, Groundwater is about city people in country surroundings. It is the middle of the Covid pandemic and, having come into a surprise inheritance, John and Liz have left London to live in an old house by a lake. Most of their stuff is still in boxes; their new furniture is yet to be delivered. As they wait – for the arrival of their furniture, for a new writing commission, for a positive pregnancy test – they work on the garden, clear the house of the rubbish left by the previous residents and try to get a grounding in their new surroundings.
The plot gets going when Liz’s sister Monica arrives for the August bank holiday, along with her Dutch husband, Harrie (a workaholic academic who seems to have a serious unaddressed health condition), and their two young children. They are soon joined in their activities by a trio of politically minded university students staying at the local campsite, who hold up a mirror to the older characters and serve as a foil for some millennial vs Gen Z debates on capitalism and political change. There is, finally, the mysterious warden Jim Sweet, a slightly eerie presence who makes increasingly uncomfortable demands on the couple’s hospitality. McMullan sends his cast on various outings – a trip to a swimming pool, a cycle through the forest, a walk around the lake. But these are of secondary importance. What animates the novel is a series of tensions: between material stability and emotional turmoil; idealism and conformity; speech and silence; love in the abstract and love in practice; between a life and the life.
McMullan handles these tensions deftly. Some he leaves cleverly unresolved, others he allows to flourish in surprising ways. He is especially good on how small events – the touching of hands at a concert hall, the mistranslation of a word in a document – take on lives of their own over time, growing and transmogrifying in the characters’ memories. His prose is on the whole pleasingly economical. And though, at times, he verges jarringly on the modish (“[John] liked a picture of Ali’s kids, tapped the Guardian”; “Oh no, not me, I’ve never been preggers”), he is largely disciplined in his register, with a sharp intuition for the well-placed poetic flourish. At the end of a particularly terse piece of dialogue, the author briefly shifts gear to linger for a moment on a wonderful simile: “‘I could fall asleep,’ she said, her voice flustered, the words shaken like dice in a hand as if anything could have been said”.
It is Thomas McMullan’s ability to cultivate this feeling – that all speech is somehow arbitrary, that all outcomes are somehow just a die’s role away – that gives this disquieting, suspenseful novel its strength.
Pablo Scheffer is a consultant editor at the TLS
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