May’s Book Club pick is Lie of the Land by Kerry Hadley-Pryce, released by Salt Publishing this year. It’s a dark, psychologically unsettling novel, very much her signature style, and highly recommended if you enjoy fiction that probes the darker edges of domestic life with an off-kilter tone. Don’t bother reading it if you can’t cope with ambiguity and if you want all your loose ends neatly tied up with satin bows, but please go ahead if you want something thought-provoking that requires you to do a fair bit of the heavy lifting yourself.
Rory and Jemma get together under something of a shadow, as he has a girlfriend. Way sooner than is comfortable, certainly for Jemma, they become a couple and jointly buy a house. It emerges during the narrative that Rory’s former girlfriend has attempted suicide because of his infidelity.
Hadley-Pryce’s novels are rooted in the Black Country, an area northwest of Birmingham, so-called because of its industrial past, when coal mining and iron foundries and factories dominated the landscape. Today, it retains its distinct, gritty, working-class identity, allowing for an atmospheric and unsettling backdrop to fiction. Certainly in this book, the landscape is a character in its own right, as is the house that the central characters live in, the Rocks.
The book raises a lot of questions, and I’m delighted to put them directly to the author:
I think it was prompted by the experience of actually living in a house that we were trying to sell, without much success. We’d lived there for about sixteen years, and it was a large Victorian place that, to be honest, had been a money-pit. It wasn’t as bad as The Rocks, I hasten to add, but I think that sense of the way in which a house can contain more than just the physical – you know: the memories or the atoms of everything that’s gone on there, and can contain them, that was what was buzzing around in my head all the time.
Noir feels like a natural comfort zone. I’m drawn to feelings about place and the uncanny. Being from, and living in, the Black Country, I draw inspiration from the setting. I think it’s place, or setting, that generally my ideas come from, and the characters evolve within that. My PhD is in psychogeography and fiction, and my writing practice includes a heck of a lot of walking, or wandering or drifting around the region, allowing myself to experience the familiar as unfamiliar. This is something I could talk about for hours, but I’ll save you from that.
The way that relationships work, or don’t work, is fascinating, isn’t it? How people get together and why they stay together is such a mysterious process.
It’s not logical at all – how could it be? There are all sorts of chemical reactions taking place and there aren’t sufficient words to describe why or how, but when I wrote Rory and Jemma’s relationship, I wanted both of them to be understood by the reader. They might not be likeable characters, and their decisions might not be the ones the reader would take, but there is a chain of events that spring from that decision that Jemma makes to approach Rory that operate as the narrative arc. I think that once that gets going, it wouldn’t have been impossible for Jemma or Rory to have walked away, of course, but people do weird things for comfort and in the pursuit of love and the trail of events, as in real life, swishes them along.
That’s a philosophical one. It’s complex. I’m sure we’ve all known people whose relationships have started in this way, and have endured, and others that have not. Humans are complicated creatures, driven by all sorts of needs and wants. I don’t think it’s possible to apply a catch-all success-or-failure certainty to any relationship, irrespective of how it began. I think that’s why I enjoy writing domestic noir like this, because fictively, it’s a prize, and the fact that relationships could stand or fall is part of the hook for the reader.
Yes. I think that to-and-fro of the power dynamic is something that switches around in real life, but in the novel, Jemma is, as you say, ambitious and bright with a good career in the law. But in any novel, everything is important to the storyline and has to earn its place: the fact that she is a lawyer is important because of what happens (no spoilers) – she should know what to do, shouldn’t she, but she makes a decision… rightly or wrongly… Because of the purchase of the house, and the subsequent situations that occur, the dependence on Rory, as her kind of counterpart, increases, and he has to step up. It is, as I say, a chain of events that bring out the characters’ needs.
We live in a society where buying and owning your own house seems to be the norm. It’s an ambition and an expectation. Property, as we know is the biggest, most expensive, and therefore probably the most important purchase we ever make. Rory, I suppose, is reacting to his own impulse. He’s of the age where he thinks he ‘should’ be on the ‘property ladder’. True, Jemma isn’t ready for that, but she’s of an age, too. This sense that there are, in fact, some ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’ in the universe, and there are some specific times in a person’s life where the *ought* to be thinking about buying property is part of the Western cultural ideal. I think this is about a kind of collision of people and opportunity that Rory thinks ‘feels right’, feels ‘normal’. I think that the purchase of The Rocks is also a commitment to their relationship – a big one – and it marks out, initially, his desire to build a life with Jemma.
Good grief, yes. Massively. It’s a huge commitment. There’s a psychological ‘binding’ as well as a legal one. Living with anyone is a step-change in a relationship but you could argue that if you’re renting a place, the impermanent nature of the living arrangement colours the relationship differently and one or the other could walk away without tricky financial obligations. It’s everything that surrounds the acquisition of a mortgage, the signing of papers etc. that can either fortify or infect a relationship.
She begins to see those twenty-five years of the mortgage stretch ahead of her. She sees the commitment blazing brightly and she can’t help but see it in a negative light. She was impulsive and, you might say, weak in agreeing to this big decision to buy the house, but she’s Jemma, and she sees the pound signs and thinks it’ll be okay, that she’ll be okay.
Haha, well, it’s an exaggeration of my own experience. As I said, we had a house that we’d lived in for a good while. It was a big Victorian place with, yes, a bit of damp, and was certainly difficult to heat, and, okay, yes, the electrics were prone to flickering when we first bought it. When I was a student, years ago, I did live in a house that was so damp, mushrooms or toadstools (I was never sure which) grew along the skirting board.
Guilt, partly, and greed, too. She turns things round to hatch a plan to her own advantage, which is, of course, scuppered (no spoilers).
As a writer, I think I write what I like to read, and I don’t want to tell the reader exactly what’s what. I want them (and as a reader, I want) to work it out. Jemma and Rory are ordinary, believable characters doing, on the face of it, something ordinary and believable. I think I’m playing on the idea of the ‘what goes on behind closed doors’ trope. I am, I confess, a very nosy person, so that very idea is interesting to me, but the real versus imaginary aspect is a link to what Mark Fisher referred to as ‘the weird and the eerie’. This is a direct link to notions of what the Black Country is: not entirely rural, not entirely urban; it’s not defined by geography – in fact there are ongoing debates about where exactly it is. People who live there won’t identify as ‘Brummies’ and there are a number of dialects that are used to exclude ‘outsiders’. This sense of otherness is something that is, essentially, ambiguous, so that is definitely a hum that goes on in my mind as I write, and I ask the reader to work out what they think is *really* happening there.
Ed and Catherine kind of represent the possible future for Rory and Jemma. They live in the house next door and their house is completely renovated. They have everything that Rory seems to aspire to have, and they also offer the peril of that future, too. Rory, yes, is transfixed by this. He can see it, and I guess, yes, he’s hypnotised by the idea of such a future.
Yes, for sure. The obsession with property as not a home, but an ‘investment’. The capitalist trap that everyone (myself included) falls into because, well, it’s ‘normal’, isn’t it? At its heart, the novel asks that question.
That’s an interesting observation. Maybe it was a subconscious link for me. There is definitely an affinity that forms between Jemma and Catherine, a kind of seductive interest between them that does lead to a convergence, a kind of almost-sisterhood. But Catherine is also a warning to Jemma: as much as Rory aspires to be like Ed, how much might Jemma then become like Catherine?
She’s a product, partly, of ‘nurture’ and the parenting she’s had. Ed and Catherine are liberal parents, able to give her what she wants and not willing or able to challenge her when her behaviour isn’t great. Parenting is one of those subjects, again, that provokes much opinion, so whether the reader thinks Ed and Catherine are good or bad parents, or whether Amber is innately a horror or not, I leave to them. The fact that Amber is the character that she is, though, is important to the plot because her behaviour clearly shows what kind of parents Ed and Catherine are, and therefore what, fundamentally, they think about what is good and bad behaviour.
Amber is lavished with ‘stuff’ and lives in a pretty amazing house in a good part of town. She is, as my mother would have said, an ‘ask, and have’ child. You could certainly interpret her behaviour as raging against that lack of affection or love, or you could say she’s spoilt and just needs to be parented more firmly. Either way, her wilfulness leads the narrative to a point where, yet again, Jemma and Rory have to make a decision (no spoilers).
We’re living in an evolving social world and the legal system is having to work hard to keep up with what is right and wrong. Arguably, social media and social communication has changed the way in which we view relationships and the way they work. What is considered fair and right has changed over the years. Apparently, up until 1976, the ‘rule of thumb’ existed, whereby it was suggested a husband could ‘discipline’ his wife with a stick, as long as it wasn’t thicker than his thumb. Whether that’s true or a myth, the very fact of the story existing demonstrates the possibility of an unhealthy power dynamic that oughtn’t exist in any respectful relationship. Categorising coercive control as a crime seems to be a very positive move towards, at the very least, preventing insidious ways of manipulation.
It’s really all about constructing a setting in which seemingly ordinary things happen and ordinary people live. The relatability is an important factor to initially hook the reader, I think. Giving the characters choices, and having them make, perhaps, the lesser of two evils , increases the ‘extraordinary’ and ramps up that element of unease. If I start to feel that twinge of foreboding, that prod of something on the horizon, just out of reach, something unsettling that *might* happen, then I know I’m on the right track.
Hard question to answer, without giving the game away, but she’s desperate and let down. She sees Rory ‘settling down’ – and quickly, too – with someone else and can’t fathom why he would have done that. Her desperation spirals, and as a narrative element, she represents a real and very harsh effect of both Jemma’s and Rory’s actions. Who do you blame (if you blame anyone) when that happens? It’s another question I want the reader to consider.
It’s horrible, isn’t it? All of that. This, really, is the difference between real life, and fiction, and it’s a demonstration of how the two are poles apart. I’m being deliberately vague here, so excuse me for that, but if, say, Rory and Jemma had made a different decision, the story would have been completely different and, to my mind, less impactful, fictively. The reader might be shouting at them for their decision, because in real life how could they do that? In the fiction, that decision kicks off a completely different phase of their relationship, it demonstrates something new about their personalities and their morals – it’s the ‘thrill’ – and it colours the readers’ view on what these two characters are all about. Up to that point, you might or might not have liked or understood them, but just then, you make up your mind, and if you think they deserve each other, that’s absolutely fine.
Who knows?
Yes, the Black Country is a particularly important aspect of all the novels. I’m fascinated by place and place identity, and place attachment and because of that fascination, elements of place or setting feature highly in my novels. The Black Country is, it has to be said, a weird place – and I use the word ‘weird’ as defined by Mark Fisher as a particular kind of aesthetic experience. For a start, nobody is entirely sure exactly where the Black Country is. There are no specific boundaries and it is described in academic circles as ‘borderless’, so, how do you know when you’re ‘there’? That’s weird. Secondly, it’s not entirely rural or urban, but a strange mix of both and that creates a particular atmosphere and mood that is palpable in real life that I try to evoke in fiction. Because of all this, this insecurity and liminal quality, to me, it’s a setting that is ripe for noir and for naturally creating that unsettling sense of foreboding.
If you’re from the Black Country and you live in this strange and liminal place, what does that do to your sense of self? Does it make you want to physically and emotionally escape? Does it make you feel ‘other’, or constantly out of place? You’re not city and you’re not town either. You’re certainly not exactly rural. What are you, and how do you make ‘something’ of yourself?
I think you’ve covered it! Thank you so much for reading the book so closely – it’s very much appreciated.
