Desire Line by Gee Williams

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First a big spoiler alert – there are some big twists in the narrative therefore you might not want to know what happens before you have read it...

This novel plays on the contrast between two places, Oxford and Rhyl (known in our house as “more cosmopolitan Rhyl” a phrase we picked up some years ago from some TV programme or other...). There is intellectual Oxford and earthy Rhyl, and Yori, with a grandparent from each of them, is pulled between these two characteristics.

In the first part of the novel you assume that Yori is a contemporary of Sara, whose body is washed up during a storm which floods Rhyl. You learn about Sara's disappearance as if it might have happened days before the flood – but then in the second part it is revealed that there has been an interval of 30 years (the flood is in 2040) between the two. And then learn that Yori is not a contemporary stranger of her but in fact Sara's grandson. But it is half way through the novels 400 pages that you get to this – and it causes considerable confusion, I did go back and check that I hadn't missed something obvious in the first part to establish the relationships (of time, and of family) between the different parts of the narrative – but no I think the confusion was deliberate.

Sara is the strong character of the first half of the novel – and her shadow and absence are still felt in the second half – she is the flawed genius, perhaps not a particular new character, but a skilfully crafted one. She is also an alcoholic and I think her behaviours around alcohol are really authentic - the little tricks of the trade by which she is able to weave additional drinks “unnoticed” into her day are familiar. This was not comfortable, in the same way that the book Kicking the Black Mamba was not comfortable, too close to home – and the fact that both the real Egan and the fictional Sara end up drowning plays on my mind.

The closeness I felt to Sara did leave the second half of the novel feeling a bit flat – but it was about those still wrestling with her absence decades later and so that flatness was, to over use a word, “authentic”. There are lots of “true stories” told that don't speak half the truth of this book.