Three novels shortlisted for this year’s Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize – Hanako Footman’s Mongrel, Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin, and Josie Ferguson’s The Silence In Between- display the exciting thematic scope of new writers.
In Mongrel, Hanako Footman weaves together the seemingly unconnected stories of three women that converge at the novel’s close. Mei is a girl growing up in Surrey, reckoning with the death of her Japanese mother and trying to fit in by suppressing her heritage and her queerness. Yuki leaves her parents and her home in rural Japan to pursue her dream of becoming a concert violinist in London, but her alienation and innocence make her uncritically grateful for the advances of her tutor. Haruka lives in Tokyo, where she works as a hostess in the sex district and grieves the death of her enigmatic mother.
Footman’s approach is sexy and cinematic. Careful attention is paid to the silkiness of swimming pools in wealthy suburbs, the glossy finish of violins and the whiteness of horsehair bows, the deep, womb-like red of the walls and leather booths of Tokyo’s strip clubs. At times though, the atmosphere is laid on a little too thick, such as when sex scenes end in poetic ecstasy: “Flight. Ascension. Rippling pleasure from centre to tips. Roots flooding with light.”
This lyricism is especially tiring when turned again and again towards descriptions of fragile femininity: “She is young and beautiful and totally alone.” However, Footman’s understanding of the intricacy of desire and her occasional insights into troubling cultural presentations of women’s suffering make Mongrel a worthwhile read.
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At the beginning of Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin, a card announcing the failed delivery of a package arrives at the apartment the two siblings share. Wondering what the package could be, Valdin notes how his sister always orders books online and then “shouts that she knows it’s unethical to buy books from big conglomerates but it’s the government’s fault that she can’t afford to be an ethical consumer because they took away allowances for postgraduate students in 2012″. The frenetic, unpunctuated stream of consciousness sets the tone for a sharp, politically engaged novel that is a portrait of a very specific and recognisable type of metropolitan elite: liberal, overeducated, obsessively online.
Alternating between Greta and Valdin’s perspectives, the novel investigates experiences of queer joy and multiracial identity that feel real and lived-in. There’s an effervescent charm to Reilly’s prose, yet underneath her characters’ relentless ironising there’s something more complex at work: a specifically 21st-century brand of anxiety that borders on existential dread. “I watch a video about how to keep your hair blonde all summer,” says Greta towards the end of the novel. “It’s winter and my hair is black.” Little elliptical vignettes like these abound, capturing something of the uneasiness of being young in a virtual world. Rebecca K Reilly’s first novel showcases an original and astute new voice.
Josie Ferguson’s The Silence In Between is a historical novel with bouts of magic realism. The story begins with a dramatic separation. The date is August 12th, 1961, and Lisette leaves her newborn baby in a hospital in West Berlin and goes to her home in the East to get some sleep. When she wakes up, the border has been closed. Here, the narrative splits in two. One half takes us back to Lisette’s youth in Nazi Berlin, where her family survives by swallowing their misgivings about the regime. The other half continues in the Berlin of the early 1960s, where Lisette’s daughter Elly enlists her crush to help her smuggle her baby brother across the border. On top of all this, Elly has a weird superpower that allows her to hear people’s souls as a music enveloping them, a useful technique for figuring out who to trust.
Josie Ferguson’s debut is highly readable and intricately plotted, promising signs for the novels to come
Ferguson’s decision to intersperse Lisette and Elly’s narratives, and so to put these two historical moments in conversation, is an intriguing one. But the material she covers feels vague and predictable, and her characters’ inner monologues are dogged by ridiculous levels of exposition. “We’ve always had to be careful with our words in the East-” thinks Elly, “the Soviets and the Stasi ever present, our phones tapped, informants on every street corner – but for me, it’s always been this way.”
The episodes narrated by Lisette during Nazi dictatorship are even more unlikely and anachronistic: “Stories of atrocities were trickling into Berlin ... It would have been easier to ignore them but I couldn’t.” Why couldn’t she? Because the reader is supposed to like her. There is a squeamishness at play here, a refusal to engage with the real moral complexities of subjugation and complicity that finally amounts to a failure of the imagination. Still, Ferguson’s debut is highly readable and intricately plotted, promising signs for the novels to come.
