Salt Publications, 6 January 2025
Available as: PB, 224pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy, purchased copy
ISBN(PB): 9781784633318
I have been blogging here for more than ten years, and reviewing books online for longer than that, and in all that time I have, but very rarely, perhaps five or six times, come across a book so stunning, so good, that it's actually hard to know what to say about it (beyond "read this").
Lie of the Land is such a book.
Superficially, it's straightforward. Solicitor Jemma and accountant Rory have recently met and decide to move in to together. The house they choose - deliberately a "doer upper" - proves to be a nightmare, and being there leads to tragedy, guilt and despair.
But the story. Oh, the story. What depths of conflicted motivation are revealed here. What layers of deceit and misdirection.
It's told mainly in a slippery, indirect voice, almost as if narrated by a third party (but who?) which informs us what Jemma "will say":
'Jemma will say she watched Rory, she observed him in a way she hadn't since they'd first met...'
'But she'll say this now, she'll say she wasn't frightened, not then, not yet.'
Is this telling us what Jemma has actually said, on various occasions? As though the story is reporting an account she's previously given, one we may be partially familiar with, as though she's already notorious? Is it rehearsing a line that Jemma is planning to bring out, if questioned? (Why might she be questioned?) Or should we pay attention to the word 'say' as being distinct from what is actually true? Through this book, these questions arise again and again, the narrative voice layering doubt upon doubt, an effect only heightened as certain awkward facts emerge about Jemma, Rory, and Rory's previous girlfriend, Sophie.
From the moment that Jemma wakes in Rory's and Sophie's flat, the moment that, she 'will say', she discovered Sophie's existence, there is, I think, a doubt. We are ostensibly hearing the story exclusively from Jemma's perspective - though the narrator takes care to plant uncertainty, pointing out for example that Jemma is very motivated by money, that she wants out of the area. (So, is the narrator an investigator of some sort?) Whether that is supposed to suggest that her behaviour is more considered than the chapter of accidents presented in the book, or, perhaps, to be read in hindsight as a comment on what actually becomes of Jemma, is unclear.
What is clear - once the central catastrophe of this book falls, numbing both Jemma and Rory - is that the layers of motivation, the failures of empathy and the presence, frankly, of evil - coil round both of them, and round their neighbours Ed and Catherine (who occasion a bit of Abigail's Party-esque light relief at first, but later add more than a touch of darkness) like mist rising from the troubled Black Country earth.
At one level the book reads as though all Jemma's troubles arose from buying that house, as though the land was contaminated (not unlikely in that area) or contained old workings except it seems to be moral contamination, ethical or relationship workings, that lie beneath The Rocks. Hadley-Pryce uses all those tropes about an old, toxic house to underscore this point. Sure, we may think, given the various references to how things might have turned out if they hadn't bought the house, it must be something akin to a haunting that is in play here (even if it's a moral rather than a spectral painting?)
But - in another level of narrative altogether - maybe not. The chronology of the book also suggests that there has been a misstep even before the house was bought. Perhaps it is only responding to what's been brought into it? There is a whole business with Jemma and Sophie that we only hear about gradually but which precedes all else.
Either way, the playing out of mounting horror, the numbing of guilt, reflected in the bitter cold of that place, the feeble rumblings of the boiler that can never heat it, the noises off, all add to a sense of deepening crisis, one that's only made worse when a particular moment of unbelievable tension passes. Hadley-Pryce is adapt at playing on her readers' fears here, seeming to present one awful thing while actually the truth is something else as bad, or even worse.
It's not always an easy book. (Typing this just now I first wrote "it's not always an evil book" - and frankly I don't know what that says!) There are, as I said, moments of almost unbearable tension. There are times you want to look away. Though short, I had to read it slowly, taking time to think about what I'd read, and to read and reread certain parts, to mark and inwardly digest them. And it kind of haunted me after I had read it.
But, oh this book. What a captivating, sly, cutting experience reading it was. What multitudes it contains. What weirdness. What darkness.
For more information about Lie of the Land, see the publisher's website here.