“Out of a dream I have brought forth the queen of the world.” This inscription, etched into the visionary stone palace of 19th-century French postman Ferdinand Cheval, appears as an anecdote in Groundwater, gesturing to the novel’s central obsession: the structures we build and the dreams, griefs and memories that underpin them.
Like Cheval, who carried a single stone for decades before completing his palace, the characters in McMullan’s unsettling and seductive second novel bear psychic burdens.
John and Liz have moved from the ordered routines of London to the liminal expanse of a lakeside house. What begins as a sun-drenched August holiday, with visits from extended family, becomes a disquieting study in estrangement, mortality and the fragile membranes between past and present, surface and depth.
From the opening page, “Already they were altered by their new surroundings,” McMullan signals that this is no passive landscape. The woods, the lake, the dead deer found by the children: each acts as a porous threshold through which the unconscious seeps.
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The natural world creeps in literally, pressing against the boundaries of the house, testing the “thin walls” between domestic and feral. The family’s new home, still incomplete, with delayed furniture and mismatched borrowed chairs for guests, becomes a symbol of the self in flux.
McMullan’s prose is textured yet restrained, moving fluidly between lush descriptions of nature and Pinteresque dialogue. The novel hums with unspoken tensions: between friends Richard and Tariq, whose brittle interactions veer toward violence; between sisters Liz and Monica, strained by old disappointments; and within John, haunted by masculine inadequacy and quiet dread of irrelevance.
Monica’s partner Harrie suffers a debilitating collapse that feels less personal crisis than a harbinger of collective disintegration.
Friction builds to breaking point when a group of students camping by the lake infiltrate the house, triggering the final rupture. Groundwater draws power from the quiet charge of small acts: scrubbing walls, folding clothes – ritual gestures of resistance against time’s slow erosion.
John’s contemplation of a submerged tree, “Could it be living still?” echoes the novel’s guiding question: what endures beneath the surface? Groundwater invites us to recognise that we too live atop hidden depths, where the personal and environmental, the self and wild, are bound in ways we barely understand.
