“Maybe humour is braided with misfortune,” wonders the first-person plural narrator of Krystelle Bamford’s riotous, dark debut Idle Grounds.
A dynamic novel with a morbid undercurrent, its Scotland-based writer takes on the collective voice of a troop of cousins, on an expedition through their aunt’s grand estate in Massachusetts (the state where Bamford was raised). Along the way, the children uncover supernatural goings-on, macabre family secrets and some of adulthood’s sombre truths.
In a foreword, the narrator offers a disclaimer about their plucky, “varied crew” with a “median” age of seven: they are like the Romanovs, to whom “bad things started to happen, including lots of chores done at gunpoint in the snow”. They are, they assert, privileged and ill-fated to a similar degree.
At a birthday gathering at their aunt Frankie’s home (the only Republican family member), trouble begins when the kids spy an unidentifiable, menacing entity outside. Abi scarpers and her brother, the accomplished, privately-educated Travis (the oldest of the bunch), assumes the role of group leader in their mission to retrieve her.
Yet Abi has departed into a parallel universe of sorts, concealed beyond “a layer of translucent fat”. Behind this is their parents’ childhood home and, in turn, the burned-down abode of the deceased family matriarch, Beezy, whose spectral presence looms over the day’s proceedings. Caught up in their grief, the parents remain forebodingly oblivious to their children’s whereabouts.
Deftly weighing up these intriguing paranormal elements with absurd family lore, Idle Grounds ushers the reader through the young clan’s quest with an unrelenting, formidable energy.
Bamford – also a poet – has a style characterised by a startling vividness and valiant humour, every page well-stocked with smart descriptions: “an almighty goulash of legs”; one aunt “a vast tundra punctured by the occasional shrub of her barking laugh”; “a scribble of a girl”.
From the vantage point of childhood, Bamford offers a shrewd, caustic perspective on how those with the most resources “scupper their own chances in life in utterly idiosyncratic ways, which is the usual province of the middle-to-upper-middle-class” – and yet we still pity them. One part child adventure novel, one part wry family history and another part social commentary, this is a debut which marks the arrival of a singular new talent.
