Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller review – a family in deep water

In the early pages of Claire Fuller’s second novel, the main character Flora is attempting to get dressed in a hurry while her boyfriend Richard observes. “Flora picked up a bra, tried to hook it together, missed the catches, tried again … ” It’s typical of Fuller’s insight that this small, practical action, experienced daily by bra-wearing women the world over, should be noted in the middle of a scene in which Richard has just discovered something devastating about Flora’s past. As in her first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, it’s the sharp eye for detail, sometimes bizarre, that makes her writing stand out. Later, Flora rushes home after a phone call from her sister saying that their father is in hospital, and as she drives from a ferry in the dark and through pouring rain, baby mackerel rain down from a nearby rock. No adequate explanation is ever offered for this phenomenon, although Richard tries, but it crops up throughout the novel as a symbol of the things we cannot know, raining down on us at unexpected moments.

Flora’s beloved father is a writer called Gil Coleman, famous for a scandalous novel. Now aged and grieving for his missing wife, he has taken a tumble from a seafront after believing he had seen her walk past in the street. Flora’s elder sister, Nan, has summoned her home to see him and they all stay in the house where the sisters grew up, an old swimming pavilion, where the ghosts of the past lie between the pages of books scattered in huge, combustible piles in every room. Flora’s narrative of what happens next interweaves with letters written by her mother telling the story of her parents’ marriage. The letters have all been hidden within the pages of different books in the house: stories within stories, quite literally, and the secrets start to fly from the pages.

The mother, Ingrid, has been missing for 12 years but Flora has never believed her to be dead. When Flora narrates, we hear her memories of her mother, “a white wraith”. In the interposed chapters, Ingrid gives her account of what was really happening at the time. The interweaving of these two points of view is a little confusing in the early stages of the novel– at one point, within Ingrid’s narrative, there is a narrative from Gil’s point of view telling the story of their relationship, backwards – and the sections often feel short and choppy. No sooner have we fully engaged with Ingrid’s story than we are back to Flora’s and vice versa, and the tone of the alternating sections doesn’t feel stylistically differentiated. But it’s a measure of the power of Fuller’s writing that these issues don’t diminish our desire to find out how the web of disappearances and reappearances will be untangled.

Our Endless Numbered Days was a dark tale about a young girl abducted by her father, a member of a 1970s survivalist cult. It also had a dual time-frame but featured a single, first-person narrator and a heart-stopping twist at the end. Swimming Lessons doesn’t have the same piercing clarity: it is an altogether more gentle and baffling book, but has all the observational touches that show Fuller to be a serious novelist with an acute awareness of the nuances and patterns of human speech and behaviour. As you get used to the rhythm of the twin stories and the narrative gathers pace, you turn the pages faster and faster, desperate to know the truth. Did Ingrid kill herself? Was Gil a charming womaniser or a monster? Will Flora be able to lay the ghosts of her past to rest? Like Fuller’s stunning debut, Swimming Lessons is a story suffused with the poignancy of miscommunication between people who love each other, of the things we can never really know.