People talk about Norfolk’s big skies, but until we relocated here two years ago I didn’t fully appreciate what they meant. Even now I’m sometimes ambushed by the strangeness of the landscape: the relentless flatness, the sense of being constantly exposed. (I don’t know how it compares to the American Midwest – please do message and tell me – but to me there’s something peculiarly inspiring about countryside where we’re forced to invent interest; it does something strange to the mind.)
Elsewhere, the topography of East Anglia – Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire – is varied and beautiful and often deeply eerie. Still and reed-covered Broads. Bleak fens. Crumbling coastline, thriving medieval ports swallowed by the sea. Facing Europe, it is an ancient place of arriving. There have been people here a long, long time – 800,000 years, at least. From the treasures of Sutton Hoo to the recent worldview-collapsing discovery that humans were making fire 350,000 years earlier than we previously knew, there’s no telling what’s buried in the peat and the clay. How could that not inspire you?
I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith
One of my all-time favourites, from the writer better known for 101 Dalmatians – but don’t let that put you off. I Capture… is the gloriously voicey coming-of-age account of Cassandra, middle child of the bohemian Mortmain family, who scrape along in well-heeled poverty in a dilapidated castle in 1930s Suffolk. Cassandra’s father is a genius who has written one celebrated book and nothing since, and in Cassandra’s effortlessly funny record of her family’s eccentricities there’s an implicit criticism of the unnecessarily agonising labour of literary writing. (Explicit, too; at one point Cassandra and her younger brother imprison daddy Mortmain in a tower, Rapunzel-style, until he’s forced out 50 pages.)
It’s such a closed setting, the wider landscape doesn’t particularly feature, but there’s a prevailing sense of isolation. Cassandra and her older sister, Rose – cut off from the dangers and compensations of society – feel it particularly keenly. (Cassandra explains Rose has been considering resorting to prostitution: ‘“If necessary, I shall go on the streets.” I told her she couldn’t go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk.’) The romantic interests, when they inevitably arrive, are life-rafts not just for their wealth but their connection to the wider world. As the real and painful business of first love begins to intrude, the dreamily hilarious narration turns more serious – but it’s never not entirely authentic, and I have no shame in saying I went into writing Little Wild with Cassandra’s teenage voice partly in mind.
On paper, 10th-century nuns in the Norfolk fens don’t make for particularly compelling reading. But this is a novel as much about people as it is the titular wetlands, and Giles imbues her characters with more than enough human complexity to keep them from descending into turnips-and-matins cosplay. The relationship between infirmarian Hilda and newly arrived Sister Wulfrun – yes, this is a queer book, and not for those who flinch at the word ‘cunt’ – is set against a tapestry of rumours, resentments and power plays within the claustrophobic world of the convent. As for without: Giles is brilliantly evocative on the otherworldly horror of the marshes, which we know today in their tamed, post-drained form – but for the nunnery and its satellite lay community, they represent an unnavigable and hostile landscape, home to terrors older and darker than any scriptural evil. An unashamed metaphor for the deep-seated folk traditions that threaten the sisters’ way of life? Sure – but Mere is the richer for it.
Nobody grasps the potential of buried history better than James, an antiquarian first and foremost. His East Anglian roots run deep – raised in Suffolk, he studied in Cambridge and spent most of his professional life scaling the echelons of the university – and the handful of stories he sets in its rural villages or coastal towns make no bones about the region’s (literally) haunting appeal. (It doesn’t feel farfetched to suggest his understanding of the landscape – not least the sense of it having accreted over the centuries, the past only thinly veiled – underpins much of his other writing, too.) Check out A Warning to the Curious, in which an archaeologist is pursued by an unearthed relic’s spectral guardians; A Vignette, ostensibly set in the country rectory that was James’s childhood home, and perhaps the closest to autobiography of any of his tales; the simply-but-aptly-named Rats. And I defy anyone to read Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad and be able to look at groins – of the breakwater variety – in the same way.
All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison
For someone who’s adored Melissa Harrison’s nature writing for well over a decade – I’m certain her ‘Nature Notebook’ column in The Times was one of my unconscious inspirations when writing Little Wild’s descriptions of the Snare Estate – it’s taken me an oddly long time to come to her fiction. I don’t know why I held off; All Among the Barley marries Harrison’s precise observations with a sympathetic yet unsentimental approach to the English countryside I would take, hands-down, over its all-too-easy fetishisation. (See also: Lanny by Max Porter.) Yes, narrator Edie paints a picture of a way of life that has been lost to us; but that way of life is only in part the rural idyll Connie FitzAllen has come from London to set down on record before it’s too late. Incidentally, not all writers give thought to cadence, but Harrison is among those who do. Her work is made, if not literally to be spoken, to be told to one’s inner ear by one’s inner voice; at a recent event in Norwich she astonished those of us in the audience, and her interviewer, by giving a reading from her latest novel, The Given World, from memory. If, like me, you find joy in the rhythm of words as well as their meaning, you won’t be disappointed in Harrison’s.
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
East Anglia is rich in folklore, and for a writer one of the convenient things about its slight sense of geographic separation is the way old beliefs seem, rightly or wrongly, to cling on longer here. Writing Little Wild, it didn’t feel much of a stretch for a 1930s village to half-believe, albeit self-consciously, in witchcraft; in The Essex Serpent, set some forty years earlier, the three-way conflict between science, religion and ritual is positively of its time. Widow Cora Seagrove, an enthusiastic amateur palaeontologist, is on holiday when she stumbles upon the tale of the titular beast, an ancient horror that is nevertheless, in late Victorian England, terrorising the town of Aldwinter. What unfolds is a gloriously pacy story that delights in tumbling together symbolism and truth, explanations and interpretations, text and subtext (not least in its exploration of extramarital attraction and unrequited love). An ode to the Gothic that is simultaneously, and very pleasingly, modern.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laura Evans studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at university before a career as a magazine editor, with a particular interest in travel and nature. Her first novel, Little Wild – a strange, dark story of first love, betrayal, and revenge set on a crumbling Suffolk estate in 1937 – is published on June 23 by Henry Holt.