The Lie of the Land

The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig

Quentin and Lottie Bredin, like many modern couples, can’t afford to divorce. Having lost their jobs in the recession, they can’t afford to go on living in London; instead, they must downsize and move their family to a house in a remote part of Devon. Mud, mice and quarrels are one thing – but why is their rent so low? What is the mystery surrounding their unappealing new home?

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Overview

The Lie of the Land concerns Quentin and Lottie Bredin, forced by the recession and the loss of their jobs to leave a gilded metropolitan life in London to rent a damp, dingy farmhouse in Devon. Lottie's teenage son Xan has missed the grades for his offer from Cambridge and gets a zero-hours contract working at a pie-factory, while his little sisters are enrolled at the village school. All are in shock in this strange new existence, where voting for UKIP and shooting foxes is normal; unlike their neighbours they have no idea what happened in their new home a year ago to make the rent so low.

This is a novel about two very different sides of the nation, especially the forgotten people of the provinces often sneered at or sentimentalised by those living in cities. It's a black comedy about a marriage in crisis which may or may not be changed by experiencing loss, bereavement, humiliation and enforced proximity. It's a psychological suspense story which builds to a brutal climax; and it is a novel unlike any you have read about the countryside before. 

Background

The Lie of the Land is another "state of the nation" novel, this time inspired by the recession that began in 2009 and which continues to the present.

One day, just before the recession became public knowledge, my husband came back from a meeting in the Treasury, very pale. He had been told what Liam Byrne, the then Labour Cabinet Minister, said in the now notorious note declaring that "there is no money left." This is why my novel begins with the words: "There is no money left, and the Bredins cannot afford to divorce." It is about the interplay between what has been happening on the national stage, and an entirely private quarrel between two very different people, who in a sense represent the city and the country.

Being married to an economist I am acutely aware of what happens, not just in the abstract but in people's lives, as money becomes more or less available. Having already lived through two recessions (in the early 1980s and 1990s) we had experienced how bad things can get, how miserable, anxious and deprived of hope - and I have made it one of my particular subjects in my fiction. I am unusual among modern novelists in that I have learnt from the Victorians the importance of naming specific sums of money - incomes, what things cost and what can be earned. Even if this information rapidly becomes out of date, it is as accurate as I can make it at the time of writing.

I have always supported marriage as an institution for the simple reason that I believe it gives the best legal protection to men, women and above all children. Like democracy itself, it is deeply flawed but I think the alternatives are worse. I am not by any means against divorce, which can be the only least-worst option. However, I almost always hope that marriages can be mended, especially when there are children involved. I believe that divorce is like a curse handed down the generations: once your parents divorce, you are, statistically, three times more likely to do so yourself.

This particular novel began when a photographer told me that he'd left his wife and children for another woman, only to find that a year later he was no happier, only a good deal poorer. "I wish I'd stuck a knife in my heart first," he said.

I was very struck by this (and used it in The Lie of the Land). Having written before about how people can come together I became fascinated by the disentangling of two lives, the misery of children, the prospect of a lonely old age and above all, the money. 

Today, when a friend (especially a woman friend) tells me their marriage has gone bust, almost the first question I ask is not about the feelings but about the money. However hurt, shocked and stunned the betrayed partner is, in the end it's about the money. Money in divorce is both weapon and balm, justice or injustice. It shouldn't be - but it is.

My warring couple decide ... well, you will have to see what they decide. I thought for years about what Lottie's choice would be. It may be the right one for her, or it may not, after all that happens to them.  But I do believe that places change people, and although my novel is about many different aspects of modern country life, it is the psychological effects - comic and tragic - which matter most..

Reviews

An absolutely magnificent state of the nation novel...very funny, very painful. If a man like John Lanchester had written this they'd be calling it a searing indictment of contemporary Britain.

Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land is as satisfying a novel as I have read in years. It is a wickedly observant comedy of manners, very alert to the way we live now, but somehow never cruel or judgmental.

Right now, the good people of Britain are acting like a bitterly estranged couple...In a Brexit Britain riven by tribal loyalties, maybe it takes a novelist to tell us a story that expands our human sympathy and makes us see the other side.

Craig is good on the messiness of family life and the absurdities of contemporary living, and there is much comedy to be had from the juxtaposition of metropolitan and rural lives as the family get increasingly entangled with the indigenous population.

In Amanda Craig’s novels, romance blooms in unlikely places, sour characters grow more sympathetic, and investigating the past tends to yield ugly results. The Lie of the Land is Craig’s seventh full-length work of fiction, and it delivers her usual mix of domestic conflict and social satire, with a timely emphasis on the ways in which economic change has fractured traditional notions of identity.

Craig’s energetic satire of middle-class manners segues seamlessly into edge-of-the-seat murder mystery..

Companionable, deceptively lightly written novel that uses a marriage-in-crisis plot to expose the fault lines in post EU referendum Britain.

Connoisseurs of schadenfreude will love this cautionary tale.

A gripping, compassionate and often funny take on a cross-section of Britain that fiction tends to overlook.

A hugely entertaining black comedy and psychological thriller rolled into one.

A hugely readable book packed with incident gradually turns into a rich and revealing portrait of contemporary Britain.

Sharply perceived family drama.

If you want to know what England is like right now, read this book. ...it describes life in 2017 in the most hilarious, entertaining, wince-making, and real way.