On Danielle Giles’s Mere
Danielle Giles’s Mere is set before the dykes and the draining, when fenland was still bog. Before the engineers got their hands on it. Before the land was forced into obedience. Before the enclosures, before capital measured the land in acres and drained it dry. This is the fens as they were: wet, shapeless, half-submerged-a place that could kill you or keep you, depending on what you offered. A landscape that remembers everything. Giles doesn’t give us picturesque fenland-no bird hides or quaint footpaths-but a sodden, secretive place where Christianity has only half tamed the ground beneath it, and older spirits stir in the reedbeds. The novel sinks into that blackness like a boot through silt.
It begins, fittingly, with a disappearance. A boy is lost in the mere, and the mere has a long memory and a bottomless stomach. The prose in the opening chapter is saturated with unease: reeds glint like blades, the moon is “as if it comes from beyond the edge of the world,” and the ground gives way like flesh. Giles doesn’t need gothic trappings; the fen is threat enough. No theatrics, no tricks. Just the slow suffocation of a place that doesn’t care if you live or die.
The missing, in Mere, are never truly absent. They return in dreams, in secrets, in the wet hush of silence. Disappearance here is not the end of narrative but its provocation. It destabilises the order of things: food, prayer, time, memory. The boy lost in the mere is not just a child but a tear in the social fabric, a threat to the convent’s fragile coherence.
“To go missing is to move beyond accountancy, beyond salvation, to become what the archive cannot absorb.”
This isn’t unique to Mere. In A Mouth Full of Salt, the disappeared also rupture the world that remains. Absence is not simply loss but a form of testimony-too dangerous to articulate directly, too powerful to ignore. In both books, the missing function as political hauntings. They call out what cannot be admitted: the failure of institutions, the complicity of those who stay silent, the persistence of what was meant to be erased.
Disappearance is also an indictment of systems that sort lives into legible and illegible categories. To go missing is to move beyond accountancy, beyond salvation, to become what the archive cannot absorb. But it’s also a form of transformation. The marsh does not return bodies as they were. It alters them. Sometimes it keeps them. Sometimes it speaks through them.
As a plot device, the missing shifts the frame: away from action and toward affect, from climax to atmosphere. It produces dread, not suspense; memory, not closure. We are not asked to solve the disappearance, only to live with its consequences. And in doing so, the novels ask us what it means to remain-knowing who has gone, and why.
A third function emerges here: the missing as method. In both Mere and A Mouth Full of Salt, disappearance resists catharsis. No one is saved. No body is neatly retrieved. No truth is revealed to restore order. Instead, the novels leave a wound open, calling for attention rather than interpretation. The reader, like the characters, remains in a state of suspended mourning. This narrative choice refuses spectacle, refuses closure, and rejects the machinery of state-sanctioned justice. The missing are not just absent. They are a refusal to conform to the dominant grammar of storytelling. And in doing so, the novels ask us what it means to remain-knowing who has gone, and why.
I’ve lived near the fens long enough to know they are not silent. They hum, they suck, they shift. Giles understands this. Mere isn’t folk horror, though it occasionally passes close. Nor is it the usual sort of historical fiction. There are no royal intrigues, no aristocratic marriages, no crusades. The year is 990. The setting is a convent on the edge of the bog, ruled by a flint-hearted abbess. The world is mud, hunger, prayer, and pain. Christianity is still negotiating a fragile truce with older gods.
The novel is concerned, above all, with women’s labour. The central figure, Hilda, is the convent’s infirmarian. She knows how to bind wounds, deliver babies, end pregnancies. She knows that healing is never innocent. She knows that the abbess turns a blind eye to rape so long as the tithes are paid. She knows how to survive. She doesn’t speak in slogans. She acts.
Sweet, a cunning woman who lives at the marsh’s edge, knows more than Hilda and resents her for it. Their relationship is one of uneasy dependence, like much else in the book. Giles writes women not as heroines or victims, but as strategists in a war no one admits is happening. To endure is to conspire.
The servant boy, too, speaks to this uneasy matriarchy. His early terror in the marsh is not just fear of death, but of a world run on rules he doesn’t understand, women’s rules, convent rules, rituals and silences and looks that pass over him. His position is marginal, and he knows it. He is not simply lost; he is outside the logic of this enclosed female world. In his confusion we glimpse how power can look like mystery to those not meant to grasp it. And his disappearance is not just a loss to the story’s order, but a threat to it. He is what the convent cannot account for, and what the marsh remembers too well.
“Giles hasn’t written a genre novel. She’s written a study in situated power, rural struggle, gendered violence, and endurance.”
Giles’s narrative is built not around action but accretion. Her structure mimics the logic of the fen itself: slow shifts, sudden disappearances, something rotting just beneath the surface. The novel loops back on itself, refrains repeating in altered form-symbols (girdle, crown, moss), phrases (“not out of comfort, but safety”), and geographies (the yew tree, the storeroom, the marsh boundary) recur like dream-logic. Time is unstable: days stretch or vanish. Wulfrun, lost in the bog, returns after what she thinks is three hours. It has been two days. Even the sun loses order. “The day passes wrong here,” one sister says. You begin to suspect it never passed right.
Wulfrun herself is a liminal figure-a noblewoman turned postulant, out of place in the convent and yet crucial to its unraveling. Her presence unsettles the hierarchy. She does not speak often, but her silence is not ignorance; it is withholding. Her moment in the bog is not just temporal disorientation-it is political. She returns changed, not in the sense of revelation, but attuned to something the convent cannot name. She walks through the rest of the novel like a warning, or a memory the marsh has spat back.. It has been two days. Even the sun loses order. “The day passes wrong here,” one sister says. You begin to suspect it never passed right.
There is, though, a subtle narrative arc. Not a plot in the traditional sense-there is no quest, no revelation, no single act of defiance that reorders the world. Instead, there is a gradual sharpening of tension between the convent and the marsh, between institutional control and submerged resistance. The boy’s disappearance is both catalyst and symptom. As winter tightens, supplies dwindle, secrets leak. A buried ritual is recalled. Women break ranks. The final chapters do not offer resolution but rupture. A boundary is crossed, physically and spiritually. The last scene is not a climax but an opening: to danger, to myth, to truth withheld too long.
There is a theological reason for this. The convent is not simply a religious outpost, it is an administrative node in a wider regime of domination. Abbess Sigeburg is no cartoon tyrant but something worse: a woman whose cruelty is bureaucratic. “She will strangle you with scripture and punishment and insist that you thank her.” She builds her authority on doctrine, relics, and a strict gendered hierarchy, but also on proximity to capital-tithes from Gipeswic, trade routes by marsh and cart, control over healing, writing, and the reproduction of bodies.
Church power is not merely coercive. It is extractive. The convent’s survival depends on relic sales, on storing food donated by the dying, on controlling who is freed and who remains enslaved. Women like Eluned and Ava are shuffled between penance and punishment depending on what labour they can still provide. Even sin is productive. Botwine, the priest, begins carving grave markers not out of grief, but out of the need to symbolically close debts owed by the dead.
And then there’s Sweet. She’s not a folk healer in the twee sense. She is a rival institution: a parallel archive of knowledge, risk, and refusal. She knows the marsh as infrastructure, memory, and trap. “Half of the convent, half of the mere,” she tells Hilda. “But this place is not kind to border-walkers.” She keeps secrets because the cost of speaking them is often paid in bodies. One ritual, suppressed by the abbess decades ago, is remembered only in fragments-green wreaths, silent bargains, offerings of flesh. It is Sweet who names the structure: “They know that something must be given, but… many do not know what.”
This is what Giles does best. She refuses clarity. She understands that doctrine is rarely enough to maintain a world. Instead, there must be something else: fear, hunger, myth, labour. The Church is not wrong to fear the mere. But its efforts to suppress it-to sink boats, to silence women, to trade in relics-only deepen its pull. “Let a mere be and it will devour all of Christendom,” the boy’s mother warns at the beginning. The convent is not exempt.
And so we return, as the novel does, to land. Mud holds memory. The marsh cannot be redeemed, only respected. Giles knows that history is not a line but a loop. In Mere, the past is never past. And neither is power.
It would be easy to market Mere as a feminist medieval parable. Easier still to pitch it as dark academia in a convent. But that would flatten it. Giles hasn’t written a genre novel. She’s written a study in situated power, rural struggle, gendered violence, and endurance. A novel of survival, not triumph.
And although the setting is more than a thousand years ago, the political coordinates are familiar. Women still bleed in private, starve in silence, resist in whispers. Land is still stolen, divided, extracted. Institutions still justify cruelty in the name of order. The fens may have been drained, but the logic remains. The black earth remembers.
In Trump’s America and Starmer’s Britain, Mere reads not as historical escape but as grim mirror. Women’s lives remain structured by institutional control dressed up as benevolence: the rollback of reproductive rights, the criminalisation of protest, the re-domestication of care. The abbess blesses the same order enforced today by home secretaries and Supreme Court justices. Like Hilda and Sweet, women are expected to do the work-quietly, invisibly-while the powerful trade in relics, or memes, and rewrite ritual as policy.
“The abbess may quote scripture; her successors quote spreadsheets and security briefings.”
Giles’s marsh is not just ancient terrain but a figure for submerged resistance: the old knowledge that refuses inscription, the collective memory of harm. Today’s marsh lies under layers of spin and surveillance, in algorithms that decide who eats, who is seen, who is heard. But it persists.
This submerged logic is also racialised. While the novel predates modern race, it portrays the machinery into which race would later be inscribed. The convent’s system of extraction-where worth is defined by labour and obedience, where some women are deemed expendable or redeemable by proximity to power-lays bare the anatomy of what would become racial capitalism. Sweet, a woman who knows but is never trusted, echoes the position of the racialised subject under white rule: visible only when needed, punished when defiant. She lives beyond the convent’s border, yet sustains it. Her refusal to be codified mirrors today’s politics of undocumented life, of unrecorded labour, of survival in the shadows.
The language of tradition and salvation still conceals the machinery of extraction. The abbess may quote scripture; her successors quote spreadsheets and security briefings. The marsh doesn’t change. Only the uniform does. Women still bleed in private, starve in silence, resist in whispers. Land is still stolen, divided, extracted. Institutions still justify cruelty in the name of order. The fens may have been drained, but the logic remains. The black earth remembers.
Mere doesn’t want your sympathy. It wants your attention. The bog doesn’t speak. It waits.
Black earth. Still water.
Book Review (63) Books (67) Britain (25) Capitalism (9) Conservative Government (35) Creeping Fascism (12) diary (11) Donald J Trump (38) Elon Musk (9) Europe (9) Film (11) France (14) History (9) Imperialism (14) Israel (9) Keir Starmer (9) Labour Government (21) Labour Party (8) Marxist Theory (10) Migrants (12) Nigel Farage (12) Palestine (9) Protest (13) Reform UK (17) Russia (10) Suella Braverman (8) Television (8) Trade Unionism (8) Ukraine (8) United States of America (72) Verso Books (8) War (15) Work (9) Working Class (9)
