When Eliza Clark’s debut novel came out with an indie publisher in 2020, nobody imagined that her second would be among the most eagerly awaited of 2023. Her rise from obscurity to literary celebrity began when fans on TikTok made Boy Parts a cult hit. It was complete when, a few months ago, Granta magazine named the 29-year-old author one of the UK’s best 20 novelists under the age of 40.
The story of Irina, a photographer who recruits men to pose for sexually humiliating images, Boy Parts lobbed an unpinned grenade of tactless comedy at subjects most authors would treat carefully, if at all. Irina is a genuinely troubling narrator: an abuse victim who is also dishonest, manipulative and an abuser herself, she occasionally resembles a misogynistic stereotype. (The scene where, in need of a car, she borrows one by gleefully blackmailing a man who recently raped her, is as discomfiting as it is hilarious.) To its many fans Boy Parts was a taboo-busting examination of gender politics and the paradoxical effects of trauma. Others shared the view of Irina’s art teacher: “You’re not making art here; you’re making porn … The world doesn’t need more nasty, voyeuristic photography, does it?”
Any lingering suspicions that Clark is a mere provocateur will be banished by Penance, which – though it won’t appeal to all tastes – is a work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence. There’s none of the lazy writing that occasionally blemished Boy Parts (where one character is “pretty as a picture and thin as a rake” and, a few lines later, “flat as a board”). Whereas most contemporary novels feel like variations on a few fashionable themes, Newcastle-born Clark seems oblivious to the latest metropolitan literary preoccupations. How many writers, for instance, would set their much-heralded new work in the unglamorous leave-voting northern town of “Crow-on-Sea”? It’s here that, a bogus foreword informs us, the action of the book we’re about to read – Penance by true-crime journalist Alec Carelli – takes place.
Carelli has settled in Crow, we learn, to investigate the torture and murder of 16-year-old Joan Wilson at the hands of three girls – Dolly, Violet and Angelica – from her school. Not every reader will make it through the opening scene, which describes Joan’s horrific death after the other girls douse her in petrol and set her on fire. Initially the crime drew little media interest, most likely because it took place on the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum. But three years later the “true-crime industrial complex” is turning its attention to Crow, spying a new opportunity to exploit human suffering for entertainment that’s “tailored to our basest instincts”. By contrast, Carelli hopes to “do something worthy”, intending to honour Crow and its still-grieving community by writing about the town as much as the crime itself.
Tracing the backstory of Joan’s murder, Carelli recounts the girls’ previous relationships by exhaustively reconstructing the banalities of high school popularity politics. But things take a sinister turn when some of them become immersed in online “fandoms” where murderers are idolised like pop stars. Meanwhile Dolly, Violet and Angelica begin bonding over an elaborately ritualised occult game where they “manifest” harm on “enemies” such as Joan – and gradually the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur.
Carelli interweaves this story with that of his own “tireless research”. For all his avowals of rectitude, he reveals his colossal hypocrisy and amorality at every turn. He secures the cooperation of the girls’ distraught relatives by sharing his grief over his own daughter’s suicide; or, failing that, by resorting to outright bullying or harassment. And he can’t help betraying his contempt for Crow’s largely working-class population – such as when, amid a betting shop’s clientele, he likens himself to a “clean plate in a sink full of dirty dishes”.
So much for Penance’s narrator; but what of its reader, engrossed by his uncannily realistic account of human misery? Penance answers Boy Parts’s question – art or porn? – by suggesting that the distinction isn’t always so clear. Slyly, it wonders if readers of Granta-endorsed literary fiction are so different from mere voyeurs. And would they ever pay attention to a town such as Crow-on-Sea unless drawn by morbid curiosity?
Penance is a bravura exercise in mimicry, pitch-perfect whether it’s ventriloquising journalism (“Confessions were quick, but the story was messy. There was no doubt they were guilty … ”) or online message boards (“They could ban me from lurking on their discord but they could NOT ban me from lurking on tumblr. the next 24 hours were a fucking bloodbath. Nuclear level discourse”). Or, indeed, an author invoking Truman Capote to excuse his fabrications: “what I’ve done is really elevate a true story with beautiful prose”.
The irony, of course, is that Capote was himself a notorious trickster and fabulist. But is Clark missing an irony here, too? After all, we still read In Cold Blood for its sublime writing, problematic ethics notwithstanding. Meanwhile, for all its remarkable command of pastiche, Penance’s single instance of “beautiful prose” is its haunting epigraph – from Capote. So far Clark has chosen to apply her formidable talent to fiction’s ethical problems and possibilities. You can’t help wondering what heights she might reach were she to take an interest in its aesthetic potential, too.
• Penance by Eliza Clark is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
