True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies
| True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies | |
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| Category: Literary Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Kerry King
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| Summary: Their first encounter – late one night in an underground car park – is just the beginning… but it is not necessarily the path to true love as we know it and the undertow of this restless sea into which our heroine has waded, can be deadly. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 215 | Date: March 2011 |
| Publisher: Canongate | |
| ISBN: 978-1847678317 | |
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Take one benefit office worker; bored, listless, a walking study in destructive human behaviour. Add a recently released, jobless ex-con with a glint in his eye and taste for masochism. Throw all caution to the wind and collide these two ingredients by means of visceral, brutal and almost wordless sex in an underground car park and you have the opening chapters of Deborah Kay Davies's debut novel.
The protagonist of the tale, as we shall refer to her since although we are aware she is a woman although we are not introduced to her by name, seems to lead a relatively drab existence. A nine to fiver in the employment of the Government with few friends and a typically uneventful social life she gives the impression that she is waiting to be invited to her life. Or rather, someone else's life. Someone much more exciting. Dangerous even.
Her wish is granted when he walks into the Job Centre; with his broad shoulders and gently curling blond hair, his easy smile and irreverent, slightly mocking manner – on sight she feels like she has been switched on; like a bolt of lightening has struck nearby and she can smell the cordite in the air.
There is therefore, no way she is not going to accept his invitation to live life. She simply cannot help it. And so she follows him to every unlikely place and situation imaginable, trailing gladly after a man, who for some reason causes her to ignore her instincts and act completely out of character. As her family and her one, good friend look on powerlessly, she consents to his abuse, allowing herself to be degraded, discarded and consumed not once, but many times.
She is quite aware that he does not care for her even though she wills it with every fibre of her being. She knows that the man is no good, that he is, in fact, a cruel bastard but she struggles with the sheer exhilaration of her plight:
One minute ready to run away from big, bad wolfy, the next romping with him in the freaking forest.
It is not as if she has no comprehension of herself, either; she appears to know only too well that she is playing with fire and that it will not just be her fingers that will burn. In considering her reflection she lets us in on that very fact:
Look at yourself. How could you do those things?
It is, however, quite clear that she has no idea where to begin to regain control.
In writing this novel, Davies it seems, has gone down the erotic underworld rabbit hole and come back with a darkly thrilling tale of obsession and, well, lust really – I mean there are those among us who will find Davies's writing a tad explicit, but frankly you cannot convey the intensity of the relationship - the victim and abuser cycle – if you are not candid in your prose. It's so clever too, if you really try and wrap your head around it; she is narrating her life and her perceived status within it (i.e. somewhere slightly below sub-atomic particle) using the kind of derogatory language and phraseology one would reserve for someone or something that triggered revulsion. Somewhere buried and as yet unacknowledged, she doesn't think that she deserves someone to make love to her and he most certainly does not oblige.
In reading, one might reflect whether a person could be quite such a victim in the same circumstances and such rumination definitely compels the reader – it's a little bit voyeuristic in that respect and there is certainly a facet of horrified fascination in the turning of each page.
Conversely, the book itself is short. A little over two hundred pages and though I could scarcely bring myself to put it down, I found myself reading the text more thoroughly than most books I have read lately. There is something of this girl in all of us and I found myself looking for my own connections.
The writer herself said:
To tag every passion with a pedigree ignores the truth that "people do things for no reason", while tick-box psychology in fiction – which "bores me stiff" - "distracts from the mystery and fascination of human behaviour".
And she's right. People do do things for no reason. And True Things About Me is a beautiful, terrifying, brutally honest account of a woman desperately trying not to fall through the cracks of her own life.
For further reading, we'd like to suggest you take a look at Sleep With Me by Joanna Briscoe.
Lastly, we at Bookbag would like to extend our thanks to the fine ladies and gentlemen at Canongate Books for sending us this copy to review.
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