Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s Peculiar Ground meditates on the function and meaning of walls. The themes of separation, incarceration, and isolation are hammered into a story about two generations of people who live in and around the vast estate of Wychwood, Oxfordshire. Wychwood is as much a symbol as it is an estate, even though it is lovingly described. So much so that it’s hard to read this book as a story about multi-dimensional people. Because of the way the narrative constantly drew my attention to what walls can mean, I kept seeing the characters as experiments in what happens to personalities who are caught on one side of a wall or the other.
In the opening chapter, we meet John Norris, an early landscape architect. He has been hired in 1663 by Lord Woldingham to turn Wychwood into a marvel of the age. Norris’ plans won’t be fully realized until centuries later, though his early efforts are magnificent. He creates artificial lakes, a secret garden, and a massive avenue of beech trees. He also helps to build a wall encircling the estate, which causes problems with the local dissenters but gives the lord’s family a sense of serene isolation from the rest of the world.
I thought that Peculiar Ground would move through the centuries, or at least go back and forth in time. It does not. Most of the novel is spent covering the mostly petty doings of the aristocratic owners of Wychwood, their guests, and their servants between 1961 and 1989. I was not very enamored of these characters, who mostly struck me as entitled, oblivious, or just very sad because of unrequited love. It’s very clear who’s in or out, who’s spent too much time sheltered at the unreal Wychwood, and who wants to be one of those sheltered. Norris’ wall has analogs in the boundaries of celebrity and wealth, legal rights, and even the Berlin Wall. The plots of Peculiar Ground, such as they are, never really build up to anything.
Peculiar Ground was not the story I was hoping for—a multigenerational story based around a great country house—what I got instead was barely engaging enough for me to keep reading. I should have stopped, but I kept hoping that the novel would return to the 1660s so that I could see what happened to the first characters we met. Apart from the beginning and the end, I was very disappointed by this book.