TITLE: Mere
AUTHOR: Danielle Giles
PUBLISHER: Mantle
ISBN: 978-1035051229
PODCAST EPISODE: None
REVIEWER: Tim Rideout
‘The mere has fingers... Clever fingers to reach through the marsh and wrap around little ankles, strong arms to pull poor sinners downwards, and a great gaping belly that can never be filled. That is why men dig the ditches and tame the water. Let a mere be and it will devour all of Christendom.’
Set in and around a small Norfolk convent in 990 CE, the titular mere dominates this immersive and atmospheric novel, demonstrating the power of landscape to shape and haunt us all.
The convent is isolated by the mere, an expansive and dangerous marsh. The mere is a liminal space, neither fully land nor water. It shifts and changes; a treacherous landscape to be navigated with care and respect, emblematic of the cultural and religious dangers that pervade the novel.
This is a novel of shifting boundaries. The convent is led by the zealous Abbess Sigeburg, driven by a need to protect the convent and its precarious Christianity from all perceived threats and at all costs. The novel places Sigeburg in opposition with the convent’s infirmarian and the novel’s narrator, Hilda, who tends to her fellow nuns’ earthly needs. Power ebbs and flows between them in mimicry of the shifting landscape.
The convent’s fragile equilibrium is destabilised by the disappearance of a young servant boy, Eadwig, lost in the treacherous mere. Eadwig’s disappearance is a catalyst, inciting fear and unease across the community, threatening Sigeburg’s authority. A new sister, the regal Wulfrun enters the convent, claiming to have had a vision that the convent is cursed and that only significant change will counteract that curse. The sense of growing dread is exceptionally well conveyed, as unease and rumours escalate across this closed and intense community. This immersive atmosphere of dread and unease is one of the novel’s key strengths. The convent descends into a bewildering miasma of suspicion, paranoia and fear. The terror provoked by the shadow of an ancient threat taints the convent, corrupting its fragile stability. The mere, its presence always felt, comes to embody this ancient terror, exuding supernatural menace.
Alongside such esoteric fears, practical difficulties escalate as supplies fail and disease becomes endemic. Looking to the pre-Christianity represented by the mere, the convent’s inhabitants are led to question their religious beliefs, forced to confront powers older and darker than their Christian faith. The land’s indigenous and pagan belief systems seem to re-assert a powerful attraction, threatening the convent’s fragile cohesion.
And amid this tension between the Christian and the pagan, Hilda finds some solace in a relationship with Wulfrun. Their relationship develops, one that encompasses love and sexual connection, and gives the novel an emotional centre, a personal story of quiet hope set against the darkness that threatens to engulf the community. Her love for Wulfrun creates another tension for Hilda, between her duty and loyalty to the convent and its Abbess, and the compulsion of forbidden love and fragile hope. Ultimately, their relationship is transformed into an act of resistance, a beacon of human compassion set against the toxic fear and suspicion that pervades the convent.
Thematically, Mere is a highly effective novel, using a series of oppositions to create tension and to drive the narrative. The novel juxtaposes early Christian faith with darker, older folklore, the mere transformed into a living, watching, ancient presence, a tangible force of memory, nature and ambiguity. Indeed, Giles’s manipulation of landscape evokes psycho-geographer Doreen Massey’s thoughts on the relationship between people and place. For Massey
places are articulations of 'natural' and social relations, relations that are not fully contained within the place itself. So, first, places are not closed or bounded - which, politically, lays the ground for critiques of exclusivity. Second, places are not 'given' - they are always in open-ended process. They are in that sense 'events'. Third, they and their identity will always be contested (we could almost talk about local-level struggles for hegemony).
Giles embraces such notions. Her mere is both liminal and porous, known and contested, its mutability an intrinsic element in the novel’s palpable sense of unease and dread.
Such ambiguity pervades the narrative. Are the infections endured by the sisters illnesses or curses? Is the novel’s horror located in the supernatural, or in a closed human system characterised by arbitrary punishment, cruelty, guilt and mania? The mere exerts a powerful influence, transmuting reality in terms of both space and time, and engendering moral decay and violence, as the community becomes increasingly feral.
Mere does not provide simple or facile explanations. Much is left to the reader to determine. This is a strength. This is a haunting, potent novel. It deploys belief (Christian and pagan) to fracture relationships and communities, in order to explore the human condition under pressure, engaging with power, isolation, love and fear. There are no easy answers. And that’s the point.
AUTHOR: Danielle Giles
PUBLISHER: Mantle
ISBN: 978-1035051229
PODCAST EPISODE: None
REVIEWER: Tim Rideout
‘The mere has fingers... Clever fingers to reach through the marsh and wrap around little ankles, strong arms to pull poor sinners downwards, and a great gaping belly that can never be filled. That is why men dig the ditches and tame the water. Let a mere be and it will devour all of Christendom.’
Set in and around a small Norfolk convent in 990 CE, the titular mere dominates this immersive and atmospheric novel, demonstrating the power of landscape to shape and haunt us all.
The convent is isolated by the mere, an expansive and dangerous marsh. The mere is a liminal space, neither fully land nor water. It shifts and changes; a treacherous landscape to be navigated with care and respect, emblematic of the cultural and religious dangers that pervade the novel.
This is a novel of shifting boundaries. The convent is led by the zealous Abbess Sigeburg, driven by a need to protect the convent and its precarious Christianity from all perceived threats and at all costs. The novel places Sigeburg in opposition with the convent’s infirmarian and the novel’s narrator, Hilda, who tends to her fellow nuns’ earthly needs. Power ebbs and flows between them in mimicry of the shifting landscape.
The convent’s fragile equilibrium is destabilised by the disappearance of a young servant boy, Eadwig, lost in the treacherous mere. Eadwig’s disappearance is a catalyst, inciting fear and unease across the community, threatening Sigeburg’s authority. A new sister, the regal Wulfrun enters the convent, claiming to have had a vision that the convent is cursed and that only significant change will counteract that curse. The sense of growing dread is exceptionally well conveyed, as unease and rumours escalate across this closed and intense community. This immersive atmosphere of dread and unease is one of the novel’s key strengths. The convent descends into a bewildering miasma of suspicion, paranoia and fear. The terror provoked by the shadow of an ancient threat taints the convent, corrupting its fragile stability. The mere, its presence always felt, comes to embody this ancient terror, exuding supernatural menace.
Alongside such esoteric fears, practical difficulties escalate as supplies fail and disease becomes endemic. Looking to the pre-Christianity represented by the mere, the convent’s inhabitants are led to question their religious beliefs, forced to confront powers older and darker than their Christian faith. The land’s indigenous and pagan belief systems seem to re-assert a powerful attraction, threatening the convent’s fragile cohesion.
And amid this tension between the Christian and the pagan, Hilda finds some solace in a relationship with Wulfrun. Their relationship develops, one that encompasses love and sexual connection, and gives the novel an emotional centre, a personal story of quiet hope set against the darkness that threatens to engulf the community. Her love for Wulfrun creates another tension for Hilda, between her duty and loyalty to the convent and its Abbess, and the compulsion of forbidden love and fragile hope. Ultimately, their relationship is transformed into an act of resistance, a beacon of human compassion set against the toxic fear and suspicion that pervades the convent.
Thematically, Mere is a highly effective novel, using a series of oppositions to create tension and to drive the narrative. The novel juxtaposes early Christian faith with darker, older folklore, the mere transformed into a living, watching, ancient presence, a tangible force of memory, nature and ambiguity. Indeed, Giles’s manipulation of landscape evokes psycho-geographer Doreen Massey’s thoughts on the relationship between people and place. For Massey
places are articulations of 'natural' and social relations, relations that are not fully contained within the place itself. So, first, places are not closed or bounded - which, politically, lays the ground for critiques of exclusivity. Second, places are not 'given' - they are always in open-ended process. They are in that sense 'events'. Third, they and their identity will always be contested (we could almost talk about local-level struggles for hegemony).
Giles embraces such notions. Her mere is both liminal and porous, known and contested, its mutability an intrinsic element in the novel’s palpable sense of unease and dread.
Such ambiguity pervades the narrative. Are the infections endured by the sisters illnesses or curses? Is the novel’s horror located in the supernatural, or in a closed human system characterised by arbitrary punishment, cruelty, guilt and mania? The mere exerts a powerful influence, transmuting reality in terms of both space and time, and engendering moral decay and violence, as the community becomes increasingly feral.
Mere does not provide simple or facile explanations. Much is left to the reader to determine. This is a strength. This is a haunting, potent novel. It deploys belief (Christian and pagan) to fracture relationships and communities, in order to explore the human condition under pressure, engaging with power, isolation, love and fear. There are no easy answers. And that’s the point.