A missing child, family secrets – this debut novel is superb

Telegraph

07-04-2025

In Idle Grounds, the debut novel by the well-regarded poet Krystelle Bamford, rabbit-holes bite at ankles. Flowers can sprout on the backs of hands; sunbeams can build a 'portico dressed in ivy'. We follow a group of cousins, the number of whom is never clearly determined, on a 'bright and clean' summer day in 1989. The family have gathered to celebrate a birthday at the secluded home of Aunt Frankie, who has inherited a plot of land ahead of her siblings. The house is one of a trio, alongside that of the cousins' parents' childhood home, and the childhood home of Beezy, their domineering late grandmother.
Bamford, who was born in France, raised in America and now lives in Scotland, sketches this family briefly. There are few particulars. The narrative voice – unnamed – is, we assume, an adult, reflecting on this particular day from the future, perhaps our present.
But the tone, and the associative leaps, are that of a child's: naive, unintentionally humorous, often frightening. The narrator insists, at least initially, that there was nothing notable about the gathering; but the environment suggests otherwise. Chickens hop around on 'hostile legs', while Frankie's handwriting looks like 'the trail of a plane in freefall'. And Bamford's story begins with a consideration of the Romanovs, whose photographs, we're told, give the appearance of 'happy mischief'. But among the cousins, like the Russian imperial family, there's no such joy. The prevailing mood is one of boredom, and beneath that, doom.
Idle Grounds is a remarkable, preternatural study of a family reckoning with its own history. Bamford's preoccupation with how bizarre things happen, and seem to happen often in childhood, is startling. Such is the crucial incident, early in the novel: the children look out of the window at a 'thing moving so fast', 'zipping' out from the tree line, never clearly seen. Abi, a three-year-old, runs out after it, and the cousins watch helplessly as the house, impossibly, 'jumps and snuffs her out'. The incident is suffused with the sort of dread that one feels as a child all the time – something only emphasised as the adults react with indifference. Abi isn't even missing, according to the nonplussed parents. Yet the children set out to find her.
Too many contemporary novels are written in a stylistically impersonal way, describing events with a deliberate, cold detachment. Not so, Idle Grounds. Objects and interludes are imbued with a near-psychedelic vibrancy. The gaggle searches the chicken coop, where another cousin finds two eggs like 'little skulls'. They move through the garden, into the barn, where horses 'dance and shake their rubbery faces'. There are 'intermezzos', which Bamford uses to tell the sorts of stories that become canonical within families: a slap on Thanksgiving, the long hike without food, and, slowly, the parallel tale of Beezy, and her death.
It's rare to see children in fiction inhabited so fully. Bamford's are decisive and autonomous, and deeply weird. She's masterful at showing the preoccupations one has, briefly, in childhood. Seven-year-old Autumn, newly gifted a watch, 'had developed the habit of consulting it even if the question wasn't related to time'. Τravis, the undisputed leader, is an object of obsession for the rest of the group: though he's aged only 12, we have to trust him as the group does.
It's odd, as a reader, to inhabit the precociousness of a child for so long, to become acclimated to their leaps of logic. Around the halfway mark, this surrealistic affect begins to feel faintly irritating. But that itchiness is appropriate, too – childhood does feel interminable; an afternoon really can feel longer than any other. Besides, as Idle Grounds reaches its grisly conclusion, that childish voice is, we realise, the only way to find sense. The frightening and inexplicable is always right there; age just allows us to ignore it. Bamford's arresting novel briefly unveils the strangeness once again.