“We will make one whole map of the Great Level drowned and so proceed to a plan of its draining,” says Jan Brunt, the Dutch engineer at the centre of Stella Tillyard’s richly involving novel of 17th-century love, land and water. The draining of the East Anglian Fens was among the most immense feats of civil engineering in pre-industrial Europe. It was, in one view, a noble work of enlightenment; it was also a tyrannically imposed scheme without regard for the rights of custom established by Fenlanders over centuries. Every kind of belief about the relationship between humans and environment was at stake among those meres and rushbeds. It is a superb subject for a novel.
We are a long way from the sparkling high society subjects readers will associate with Tillyard. Best known for Aristocrats, the bestselling 1994 biography of the Lennox sisters that became a TV series in 1999, she drew large audiences to 18th-century history with her sure eye for dashing characters and bravura period scene-setting. She turned to fiction in 2011 with Tides of War, a panoramic Regency romance. In The Great Level she enters regions far more obscure, and draws attention to histories few will know. Drainage may not be a word much used in the heritage industry but what happened in East Anglia in the 1640s and 50s deserves a significant place in national memory. If there’s a television drama this time – and there should be – it will be without a pearl in sight.
Jan Brunt’s narration takes us deep into the liquid landscape of the Fens as he paddles his coracle through the intricate network of channels and marshes. Wielding his measuring lines and chronometers, he looks with pleasure on his task. The desire to make shapes from chaos, he reflects, is the fundamental impulse of artist and engineer alike. “We all wish to bring order to the passing world, to stop the pulse of nature for a second and hold it up for all to see.” He is engaged in an act of creation, and envisages the new fields, carefully hedged and gold with corn, as things of great beauty. This is an art demonstrated by the God of Genesis who said “let the dry land appear”, and it was so. It is also the proud art of his countrymen, “compelled for centuries to attempt the separation of land and water wherever we find them muddled up”.
But the Fens are changing Brunt, working on him as an enchantment. There are things here his instruments cannot measure. Suddenly, irrevocably, these feelings find form in the siren figure of Eliza, a Fenland woman whose song comes over the water, who appears from nowhere like a wraith, but who is – it becomes clear – a solid figure, her feet skilfully planted on shifting ground. The Great Level, then, is the story of a strange and passionate relationship between engineer and Fenlander, a careful professional with his pencil and an illiterate fisherwoman from the willow huts in the marshes. They are tough and taciturn lovers who meet in dark lodgings beyond the last lights of town. Gradually, they learn from each other. As he teaches Eliza to write and to measure, Brunt starts to notice feathered rush-heads, the cries of geese, “black nets” of starlings as they “shrink and billow from tree to tree”.
These central characters are invented (and by most accounts Britain could have done with them: there was no one as expert as Brunt on the job). But Tillyard works closely throughout with matters of fact. She describes Ely left in ruins by the civil war, and the violence that continued through the years of reclamation as local people made desperate efforts of resistance. She has Cornelius Vermuyden, the project director, declaring complacently from the safe distance of London that the Level is home only to a “lazy and barbarous people who trap eels and other such trash foods”. Disturbingly accurate, too, are glimpses of the appalling conditions in which thousands of prisoners were forced to work as labour gangs, digging embankments until their feet rotted in the mud. Their agonies, as well as the remains of Roman roads, are part of what lies under the fields.
Tillyard’s canvas already stretches across the flatlands from Cambridge to King’s Lynn, but she extends it much further by setting half the novel in the New World. This is where it begins, in 1664, with an older Brunt in Nieuw Amsterdam, where he lives with Delft tiles around his hearth and the expanse of an unknown continent at his back. As the novel moves back and forth in time and place, scenes on the Ouse in Norfolk are overlaid with scenes in newly drained Manhattan (where the Dutch have made a “firm edge” around the island tip). Amplifying each aspect of her story, letting it resound across the world, Tillyard links the colonisation of the Fens with colonial land ownership and improvement in Virginia.
Comparisons will be made to Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill: they spring to mind as soon as we see “Manatus Eylandt” at the top of the page and realise that we are in an early America of Dutch-gabled houses running up from the harbour. These novels, both by brave and humane historians, share some of the same appeal. But while Spufford is in his element among the noise and bluster and high-spirited wheeler-dealing of New York, Tillyard is at her best in the quite different elements of river, coast and air, silence, steadiness and yearning. When the articles of surrender to the British are signed in Peter Stuyvesant’s house one September morning while life goes on as normal in the streets, Jan Brunt becomes John Brown. But though he may have “the name of any man” he is too guarded and withholding to be an everyman. It is his oddness that holds us, and his plain, formal prose. His restraint and self-sufficiency are matched only by Eliza, who tells her story with brisk, acute intelligence.
Rousing and heroic though that story is, it’s hard to feel Eliza’s presence. And though the American sections are finely plotted, the real power of The Great Level is in the Fens. It is in the sudden desire Brunt finds there and the slow, seeping damp. It’s in the immersed, liquid imagination that falls on a memory of words written long ago in Holland with the invisible ink of lemon juice, held to the candle flame until the heat reveals them. It’s in the fear of the workers who throw down their spades when “strange and wonderful things” start to come up from the ground, and in Brunt’s rapt curiosity as he sifts the ash from a cremation urn and asks: “Who are you?” It’s in the questions that we have not yet answered about when to intervene with projects of cultivation and control, and when to let the water run where it will.
Like Brunt’s work on the Level, this is a novel of large vision and careful detail. If the map Tillyard makes doesn’t form a perfect whole, that’s no great loss. She paddles her coracle deep into little-known channels and conjures atmospheres as thick as still summer air over the meres.
• Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies is published by Thames & Hudson. The Great Level is published by Chatto and Windus. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
