The premise of Imogen West-Knights’ debut is rich with emotive potential. Deep Down begins as Billie, a twentysomething Londoner, and her older brother Tom, a “failed actor” living in Paris, face unexpected news. Their father has died suddenly. The “frighteningly unfamiliar territory” of grief opens before them. These estranged siblings decide they need to be together, and so Billie flies to France.
West-Knights deftly shows us that the relationship between the siblings, and with their dad William, is anything but straightforward. In prose with a spareness conveying the numbness of early bereavement, Deep Down shuttles between present and past, as well as between Tom and Billie’s very different but equally vulnerable perspectives. Attention is directed to the complicated tenderness and shared history between them, existing regardless of an intractable awkwardness. This latent closeness is conveyed in fleeting and often powerfully ambivalent images. When Billie stays in Tom’s cramped garret, he recognises that she “sleeps as she always has, on her front, arms pinned behind her and her face squashed up by the pillow like someone being punched”. Woozily wandering between the arrondissements, the siblings dodge tourists and tiptoe around each other’s feelings, awaiting news of funeral plans. The withholding of information is masterfully sustained as we come to understand why they have responded to their father’s death with such profound ambiguity.
This all sounds dreadfully serious. And the novel is a serious and very accomplished examination of what it means to love and grieve for someone who might seem unlovable. It wrestles, too, with the timeless question of how to form one’s own distinct adult identity in the shadow of a difficult parent.
But it’s also immensely funny. Readers may have encountered West-Knights’ ample comic gifts when following her former Twitter alter ego @BougieLitWoman, a cult account parodying the self-satisfaction of London’s literati. When the narrative loops back to the protagonists’ earlier lives, her observations of the nine to five are hilariously unforgiving: “At work, Billie spends most of her time with Martin, her direct superior, a lumpy man of about forty-five with back problems that he refers to as often as possible. He has described Billie twice as ‘the edgiest person in the office’, a wholly unearned moniker which she thinks has something to do with her cartilage piercing.”
Such crispness could have given the narrative a slightly sneering edge, but West-Knights’ quiet focus on the vulnerability of her lead characters grounds the novel in a more humane place. There are poignant glimpses into how the young Tom and Billie coped with their father’s aggression. In one finely wrought section during a family holiday to Spain, 13-year-old Tom is privy to an awful altercation between his parents in the supermarket. While tempers escalate, all Tom wants are “ice creams in the shape of Sonic the Hedgehog … Not only do they look awesome but he imagines they probably turn your tongue and lips blue, which will be a lot of fun because he can lie on the ground and pretend that he’s died.”
The confident and gripping climax takes Billie and Tom into the catacombs under Paris. A less assured novelist might have shied away from bringing a narrative with themes of concealment, sublimated emotion and repressed history to a head in a subterranean setting. But those who have encountered loss will recognise how agonisingly apt the backdrop is here – a strange place of echoes, shadows and impenetrable darkness. Perhaps what is bravest about the novel’s artfully inconclusive ending is the painful acceptance that, with grief, there may never be a clear way out into the light.
• Deep Down by Imogen West-Knights is published by Fleet (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
