Holly Pester, a poet whose 2021 debut Comic Timing was shortlisted for the Forward best first collection prize, cut her teeth at disorderly open mic nights and has, as a result, a keen interest in the difference between delivery and performance. Both are essential, she says, “whether it’s at a poetry reading or on the page”. They might be considered synonymous, she told Frieze magazine in a 2021 interview, “but I like to remember that the text is always there, it’s like a score, a contract”. No surprise, then, that The Lodgers, her fiction debut, performs so well on the page; it’s a poet’s novel in that sense.
“As a bored and nervous young girl,” Pester’s unnamed and disorganised narrator relates, without stopping to find out if she should open up to strangers like us, “I often imagined myself climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing machine drum or bread bin, and living in there.” She’s tired. She’s been travelling all day. She’s moving into a new flat, which resembles a triangular sandwich package, sublet from “a paranoid boy” she’s never seen. The details of the arrangement have a wry, playful quality, but there’s an underlying nervousness; the room doesn’t feel real to her. A glass smells of dirty hair, a window affords nothing “except the stillness of a town at night”, the “origin point of boredom” in her life.
