Hybrid novels fusing prose and poetry are in vogue: witness the success of Derek Owusu’s prize-winning That Reminds Me, Jen Calleja’s innovative Vehicle and Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, among others. Playwright and lyricist Megan Barker follows suit in this poignant debut about the pain of witnessing a loved one’s depression at close quarters. Or at least that’s how I read it: the book, 160 pages long, raw as well as wrought, is narrated by a woman, Megan, who loses a male friend – the titular Kit – in circumstances that, as with much else here, you’re invited to infer; told in bittersweet retrospect, it’s a novel of spaces and gaps, of things that didn’t happen or might have happened, or ought to have.
Megan and Kit meet in the 90s while living in Glasgow. Their friendship is joyous, intense, platonic-ish – she’s attached and he’s sleeping with her flatmate, which she finds herself overhearing more keenly than she’d like.
After a snapshot of their early 20s – nights out, plans, ambitions – we cut to London (“last year”) as they’re catching up in middle age over a curry. But Kit doesn’t look well – there’s an oblique reference to whether his drugs are working or not – and he has stalled (we think) on a photography PhD, talking about an ex-girlfriend who aborted a child he wanted. Megan, for her part, is knee-deep in what she calls, not altogether joking, “the Great Betrayal”, wed with three young children:
“My daughter never sleeps.
My marriage is on its knees.
I speak in ultimatums.
I have become a gaoler of wild things...
All deep thought has been replaced with lists.”
Much of Kit’s texture comes from the granular rendering of its narrator’s push-pull emotions around motherhood, from lying sleeplessly at night in a bed crowded with unsettled kids, “snatch[ing] angled breaths over all the tangle of hair in my face”, to waking up to “a million notifications... from other mums about the potato person we are supposed to have made, ready for school”. But the book’s crisis comes when the narrator, after a hesitant yes from her husband, brings Kit on their family holiday to the Welsh coast, which ends abruptly after a harmless accident compels them to weigh their duty to Kit against their duty to their children.
Addressing Kit throughout, the novel makes no attempt to inhabit his state of mind; these are the narrator’s feelings, not his. More silhouette than character, even a void, Kit sometimes seems to stand in for the lost freedom of the narrator’s youth – a symbol, somewhat selfishly, of roads not taken. Yet there’s an ethical steadfastness, too, to the novel’s candidly self-centred narration; it feels somehow significant that the only three named characters other than Megan are all monosyllables – Flo, Mac, Kit – as if placing strict limits on disclosure in a novel that feels like life poured into art.
True, Barker’s poetic sensibility can feel willed; this is the sort of book that sees fit to describe Glasgow as “this most marcasite city”. But more often the diction hits the bullseye: playful as well as serious, mashing near homophones to layer meaning (“the messh of existence”, say, which more or less sums up the book’s theme), and a slyly sexual undertow that hints at the range of the narrator’s unvoiced feeling. In this novel – a fleeting requiem – the problem of finding the right words ultimately leads to none at all: “what’s to be said? / When your blood’s full thrumming / but all you have is A-Z.”
• Kit by Megan Barker is published by Cheerio (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
