Gripping & Brilliant

The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I can't believe I haven't read Amanda Craig before. WHY HAVEN'T I READ AMANDA CRAIG BEFORE? The only answer I can think of is that she is one of those authors who sits, rightly, in the Top League; who makes it onto long lists for big prizes but who, so far has never won one. This means that the limelight has never quite fallen on her as it should.

'The Lie of the Land' was first published in 2017 and is as brilliant as all the snapshots of reviews - 'superbly plotted,' 'gripping,' 'ingenious', - on the jacket claim. It tells the story of Quentin and Lottie Bredin, a journalist and architect respectively, both mutually desperate to divorce but who, thanks to the recession and the loss of their respective jobs, cannot afford to. With children of their own, as well as from previous relationships to worry about, along with very different wider family networks, there is a lot to reconfigure. By way of a stop-gap, they decide to move to Devon until such time as they are able to free up funds by selling their handsome family London home. The house they move to is remote and very cheap to rent, factors which Craig deploys beautifully to build up suspenseful elements of her tightly knitted plot. While Quentin and Lottie are locked in the emotional warfare triggered by Quentin's adulterous habits, the reader's attention is also drawn to wider darker forces at play in the world around them. It is a perfect construct.

Amanda Craig writes her characters with astonishing and enviable insight. There is such wisdom in her portrayal of their lives, such empathy and warmth. This means that, no matter how dreadfully any one of them behaves - and there is a vast cast in play, encompassing not just two extended families, but also the diverse and multi-layered Devon community - there is never a sense of easy judgement going on. Craig shows how we are all forged by whatever experiences we have lived through or are grappling with, and that the business of who is 'good' and who is 'bad' is never clear cut.

The background canvas of the novel is huge and full of insight too, whether it is depicting a nation in recession or describing the tough life-style and choices faced by sheep farmers, social workers, teenagers.... Nothing felt left out. At times, I even found my mind leaping to George Eliot's mighty 'Middlemarch' - another sublime fictional creation of an entire world in microcosm.

The only slight faltering for me occurred towards the very end of the novel when, the denouements of the various plot threads started to feel more about explanation than action. But this is a miniature niggle about a book that for over four hundred pages kept me glued, made me laugh out loud, as well as shake my head in wonder at the seemingly effortless highlighting of so many home truths. Yes, the plotting was masterful and neatly tied, but it was Craig's characters who carried the day, so vivid, so believable - they live with me still.



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