Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly review – lust at first sight | Fiction

Rozie Kelly’s frank and feisty debut novel, which has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, begins with a case of lust at first sight. Our unnamed narrator is a “beautiful” 35-year-old writer in a complicated but loving relationship with the equally beautiful but somewhat boring Michael. The object of his attentions is a famous poet, 17 years his senior, running a popular course at the same university that he, in a minor way, is also attached to. He hardly knows her, but he knows that he wants “to be inside her”. It’s all a bit of a shock. “A woman! What was the world coming to?”

So what’s so special about this one? Well, she’s smart, good-looking, well-dressed, not to mention rich and famous. It is this last fact that seems to exert, at least to begin with, the greatest hold over the infatuated narrator. “I wanted to be her, to be like her, to have her success and to know the people she knew.” But also, as he admits to himself as they sit quietly on a park bench watching the ducks, he would like to subjugate her, “to push her down, to render her imperious intelligence stupid with the weight of my body, with my younger, harder form”.

This is a novel that is not afraid to shock, and it certainly gets off to an attention-grabbing start. Told in the close first person, Kingfisher recounts – perhaps unreliably, and with increasing elements of fantasy – the complicated relationship that develops between the narrator and the poet, or “Kingfisher”, as he later names her, due to her love of birds. They begin by meeting to discuss the narrator’s forthcoming (and in fact nonexistent) poetry collection. One thing leads to another, and the night passes with poetry left undiscussed. At this point, the narrator is still rather surprised by the turn things have taken (“I thought she thought I was gay. I thought I thought I was gay”). But over time – and hastened by a terminal cancer diagnosis – they settle into the rhythms and habits of a regular loving relationship.

That’s not to say that things aren’t still messy. The narrator’s relationship with sweet but dull Michael, understandably, gets worse. Fed up, Michael disappears to Mexico for two weeks, and returns with a much younger model. The narrator begins to spiral. There is a great deal of drink and drugs and impromptu sex with strangers. “Polyamory”, suggests a friend. “Many loves. That’s what you’re doing.” Meanwhile, the narrator must also contend with his racist and homophobic mother, Hetty, who is confined to a care home. “And you’re still living in sin, are you?”, she asks, on one of her son’s reluctant visits. This constitutes one of her more polite utterances.

Kelly shrewdly, and rather bravely, explores the different forms love and lust can take – made sharper here by a power dynamic that is skewed first one way (older woman; younger man), then another (patient; carer). There is always the question, constantly mulled over by the narrator, and put to him directly by a wise friend: “Who’s using who here, do we think?” The answer: they are both using each other. Hell, they are writers on the make; everyone is potential copy.

Unfortunately, despite a confident start and an intriguing premise, Kingfisher fizzles out after the first few chapters. Interesting characters are established then forgotten about; narrative threads are not so much lost as never picked up. The novel seems uncertain which way to go. It seems particularly odd, at least to this reader, that the bracing language and violent desires that open the book should so quickly give way to bedside solicitude and quiet domesticity. Indeed, there is an uncertainty of style and tone throughout, most clearly signalled by a late-stage change of genre that sees us entering the realms of gothic fantasy. The ending comes dangerously close to “it was all a dream”.

Kingfisher has a lot of verve and energy. It is not afraid to take risks or look absurd. It crackles and sparks, but it never quite catches fire.