Set on a property in the Norfolk marshlands (where in real life Cusk lives with her third husband, a painter), the novel is narrated by M, a writer who lives there with her second husband Tony, a large silent man who is deeply connected to the land. Years ago in unhappy times, M stumbled across an exhibition in Paris of a well-known artist, L, and has been obsessed with his work ever since. Although she has never met him, she has started a correspondence inviting him to come and work in their “second place”: a house on the property the couple makes available to writers and artists. She is convinced L is one of the few painters capable of capturing the light and landscape where land and sea are meshed. She is also fascinated by the man whose paintings prompted her to leave her first marriage and change her life, though she also has the sense that she has met the devil, whom she describes encountering on the train back from that trip to Paris.
L stalls for months but eventually arrives after a complicated journey with a second unannounced guest, a beautiful young woman named Brett, whose presence throws M. In a subtle reference to the pandemic, there is a lightly-alluded-to world event occurring, which makes travel almost impossible. It has also caused M’s daughter, Justine, to return home with her Berlin boyfriend Kurt; the pair must now move from the second place to the main house. The weeks pass. Justine and Brett become friends. Encouraged by L, Kurt starts to write a novel, though when he reads from it one evening, L takes him down with a simple dismissive comment. M hardly sees L, and when he is in evidence, he keeps his distance or is openly hostile. They have a few challenging conversations. L decides he wants to paint portraits, not landscapes, and invites everyone but M to sit for him. When he does relent, instructing M to “wear something that fits”, M puts on her wedding dress and sets out, ignoring an out-of- character command from Tony to “Come Back Here”. However, when she approaches the second place she witnesses a bacchanal scene of L and Brett painting a ghoulish Garden of Eden mural on the walls and turns around. It is too late, Tony has driven away.
Tony is gone for five days, during which M is paralysed with grief. The evening he returns, L suffers from a stroke, returning two weeks later from hospital and forced to stay as the crippling, unspoken world events mean his work has no value anymore and he has nowhere to go. Brett
leaves, unable to cope with caring for L, which falls to Tony, then Justine. L painfully resumes his work, finally depicting the coastal landscape at night in paintings that will posthumously restore his reputation. Finally, he leaves for Paris, where he dies soon after, and the satanic presence that has been lodged inside M since she first saw L’s work disappears. After his death, vicious letters written by L about M come to light, though he has left one of the night paintings to Justine which will become very valuable.
As with all of Cusk’s work the brilliance here is in the writing and observations about marriage, parenthood, desire, ageing. She uses the awkward, spikey interior world of a narrator at once self-possessed and riddled with self-doubt, to explore the different aspects of power people have over each other: “So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you”. This could be between husband and wife, mother and daughter or potential lovers. M’s illusions and unease are mirrored in the beautifully described shifting permanence of the landscape out on the marshes as she battles with the realisation that power diminishes with age. The story is told as a confession, addressing someone called Jeffers, about whom we know nothing – in a less skilled writer’s hands this wouldn’t work, but here it gives the story more immediacy and L a vulnerability that allows her to question herself. Apart from M’s trip to Paris and the description of the journey into the local town to pick up L and Brett near the beginning, the entire novel is set on the property by the sea, which gives it a claustrophobic, theatrical setting as the dynamics play out between the characters and the story moves forward in subtle ways with a Bernhardian interiority underpinned by existential neurosis.