{"id":30787,"date":"2025-07-23T08:27:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T08:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/30787\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T08:27:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T08:27:07","slug":"groundwater-by-thomas-mcmullan-review-a-lesson-in-foreboding-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/30787\/","title":{"rendered":"Groundwater by Thomas McMullan review \u2013 a lesson in foreboding | Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas McMullan\u2019s debut novel, The Last Good Man<\/a>, was a darkly unsettling post-apocalyptic fable about moral puritanism and the perils of mob rule. Set in an isolated Dartmoor village, it was commended by Margaret Atwood as \u201ca Scarlet Letter for our times\u201d and won the Betty Trask prize. His follow-up, Groundwater, opens in\u00a0similar style, with its protagonists fleeing a city in favour of rural seclusion, but this time his story is rooted in a more prosaic and recognisable present.<\/p>\n

An unexpected inheritance has spurred John and Liz to trade in their rented flat in London for a remote house by a lake. After years of trying unsuccessfully for a baby, their relationship strained, both hope that the change will shift something inside them. Meanwhile, though most of their furniture is yet to arrive, they must prepare the house for Liz\u2019s sister Monica and her family, who have invited themselves to stay.<\/p>\n

From the opening pages McMullan stokes an unambiguous sense of foreboding. It is August and the weather is stifling. Walking by the lake\u00a0John encounters a baby deer, struggling to\u00a0stand on an injured leg. The next day\u00a0after breakfast, Monica\u2019s children find the fawn dead on the doorstep. A\u00a0stranger claiming to be a\u00a0local warden materialises on their land and invites himself to stay. No one thinks to check his claims. When three students from a local campsite also contrive to inveigle themselves into the group, something terrible, it seems, must happen.<\/p>\n

Ominousness is piled upon unease and yet McMullan meets his own challenge only with the humdrum<\/p>\n

Reading Groundwater, I was repeatedly reminded of Chekhov\u2019s famous exhortation that one must not\u00a0put a loaded rifle on the stage if no\u00a0one is thinking of firing it. The warden, Jim Sweet, tells John and Liz\u00a0about the caves deep below the surface of the lake, miles and miles of unmapped tunnels snaking through the limestone. Liz is haunted by the memory of a dog she watched dying in the hallway outside their London flat. She stares at the walls of trees around the lake and thinks of the California wildfires on the news: \u201cAll that burning, a thousand things dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ominousness is piled upon unease and yet McMullan meets his own challenge only with the humdrum. Terrors are proved baseless. Confrontations blaze briefly and fizzle\u00a0out. Unable to bring themselves to say what they are really thinking, the adults conduct long and often mundane conversations about inconsequentialities, while the twin interior monologue that shifts often confusingly between John and Liz adds little insight or forward propulsion to the narrative. Insufficiently differentiated, their voices blur: though we spend much of the novel inside their heads, their true selves remain opaque, unformed, out of reach not only of themselves but of the reader.<\/p>\n

Liz, a writer, is working on a\u00a0scheme\u00a0to monitor the black rhinos in\u00a0a national park in Kenya, but \u201cshe\u00a0hadn\u2019t been to the national park herself \u2026 everyone was remote\u201d. The\u00a0same sense of remoteness, of a\u00a0reality half-understood but never experienced, pervades these pages. Meanwhile a second intercut narrative, in which dream-like versions of John and Liz draw items including a crystal decanter, a crutch and a child\u2019s hobby horse from the waters of the lake, adds a baffling dollop of mysticism to proceedings.<\/p>\n

As I read on, my thoughts kept returning to another novel set by a\u00a0lake, Sarah Moss\u2019s Summerwater<\/a>, and\u00a0not only because of the powerful echo in the title. Like Groundwater, Summerwater, told over a single rain-lashed day in a lochside holiday park in Scotland, is preoccupied with the quotidian, exploring through its 12 narrators the fissures and fractures that open in relationships, the certainties brandished like weapons against fear and vulnerability, the joys, yes, but also the small, terrible failures of courage and understanding.<\/p>\n

Why, then, does Moss\u2019s novel triumphantly succeed and McMullan\u2019s never take flight? It helps that Summerwater\u2019s simmering tension finally explodes into catastrophe, while Groundwater swerves perplexingly away from climax and sputters out. But it is Moss\u2019s astonishing acuity, her\u00a0uncanny ability to see inside the human heart, that lends her work such\u00a0power. It\u00a0is much, much harder than she makes it\u00a0look to\u00a0draw readers deeply into the small dramas of small lives, harder still to find the universal in the particular, to\u00a0draw fresh and meaningful patterns between people and landscape, between age-old cycles\u00a0of existence and the insistent demands of the here and now. Moss\u00a0manages it with flourishes of\u00a0sly\u00a0humour that both leavens and\u00a0intensifies the horror\u00a0to come.<\/p>\n

McMullan\u2019s novel would definitely have profited from a few more laughs. Instead, in striving for an elusive profundity, he reminds us how strikingly difficult it is to spin gold from straw, and how very rare and precious are those Rumpelstiltskin writers who show us how it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

Groundwater by Thomas McMullan is published by Bloomsbury (\u00a318.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thomas McMullan\u2019s debut novel, The Last Good Man, was a darkly unsettling post-apocalyptic fable about moral puritanism and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-30787","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}