The plot of ‘Idle Grounds’ is tricky to summarise as it’s not obvious what’s going on. The novel is set during a family party on a Summer’s afternoon when the parents are preoccupied with one another and the unsupervised cousins play outside in a ramshackle large garden. The narrator is now an adult looking back at this pivotal childhood event and also speculating about how their grandmother Beezy met her end before she was born. She’s inclined to let her attention wander resulting in several ‘intermission’ chapters that break up the narrative. The reader gets the impression from her unusual turns of phrase that the narrator is trying a bit too hard to seem literary and that adds a layer of humour to the account.
I was simultaneously intrigued and bemused by this strange book - it helps that it’s not very long. It reminded me of those songs about childhood from the psychedelic era that convey menace as well as nostalgia. A very real sense of threat is lurking even though we don’t know what it actually is!

The main storyline in this debut novel by poet Krystelle Bamford is set over one hot June day, in the 80s, in rural New England. A group of young cousins have gathered, with their respective families, for a birthday party at the house of their unmarried aunt Frankie. Left to their own devices, the children explore the house and, from the window of an upstairs bathroom, spot something eerie and undefined, prowling in the grounds of the property. Three-year-old Abi runs down and promptly disappears. For the rest of the day, the children, led by eldest cousin – twelve-year old Travis – explore the house and its surroundings, looking for Abi but, by the end of the day, discovering more than they bargained for.

This type of novel – in which a now-adult narrator looks back to a defining event in childhood/youth – has become a genre in itself. It takes an original writer to make such a story stand out, and Bamford fits the bill.

What, I felt, makes this slim novel memorable is the idiosyncratic voice of the unnamed narrator. It combines within it the wide-eyed wonder of the child who experienced the day’s events, and the more-knowing style of an adult who, perhaps, is trying too hard to sound like a “literary author”. The result is a narration which is at times eerie and unsettling, surrounded by a magical aura (we never learn what exactly the children were seeing from the bathroom window – probably a figment of their fertile imagination) and, at others, darkly humorous in an offbeat way. The narrator, for instance, has a knack for convoluted metaphors and irrelevant digressions, but then surprises us with passages of poetic intensity.

Bamford also keeps a tight control over the plot. As the day unfolds and things come to a head, there are several flashbacks and flashforwards which allow the readers to slowly piece together the dark history of this eccentric family, dominated by the matriarchal figure of Grandma “Beezy” and her mysterious demise. Thus the novel achieves a double-climax – one happens on the day of the main storyline, but it coincides with our discovery of what actually happened to Beezy. It’s all very clever and well-crafted, turning a now-common trope into a memorable debut.

4.5*

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2024/08/idle-grounds-by-krystelle-bamford.html

I was initially interested in the plot and subject of this book, but unfortunately found the writing to be incredibly hard to get through! It felt a little clunky and the characters were over written and hard to understand and root for. Not for me.