What would you do with the ability to slip out of your body and prowl the world undetected? The possibilities for crime, mischief or adventure seem limitless, especially for a restless teenager. One night Kit, the introspective narrator of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s third novel, rises from her bed in the room shared with younger brother Leo, but realises with a shock that her unresponsive body is still tucked up. Exploring this new freedom, Kit chances to peek at the hidden recesses of her parents’ marriage, but how to interpret the scene is a puzzle that will consume her.
Just as disruptive poltergeist activity is associated with adolescence, Kit’s out-of-body experiences coincide with a burgeoning sexuality and growing impatience with parental restriction. In literary terms, there is another entity capable of melting through walls and drifting about unseen, and that’s an omniscient narrator. But Kit can only observe on her night-time travels; she can’t penetrate minds, grasp thoughts or read motives, which due to her lack of emotional experience, remain deeply obscure. At her most vulnerable and questioning, she witnesses something disturbing in the dynamic between her quiet, undemonstrative mother (of Japanese heritage, like previous Buchanan characters) and ebullient musician father. “I wondered if I’d got something wrong … If the things I had barely seen were a secret code between the two people I knew best.”
Kit is an amalgam of the two, more outgoing than “M”, less exuberant than “F”, as she calls them, yet it’s to F she feels most attuned, even at his most demanding and difficult. The decision to side with him will prove costly. Your parents, as she observes, are “your first maps of how to live”. The fact that Kit is writing all this down for a new lover, 12 years after the events she describes, is both a warning of potential instability, and a plea to be accepted and absolved.
The action takes place in a fictional yet wholly believable seaside town a few hours from London, where Kit swims, schools and socialises. On the surface all is serene: “We were the sort of family who went on holiday to other old British towns and read from the metal plaques about the history of the cathedral.”
On a deeper thematic level, Gabriel, F’s real name, is obsessed with angels and reads Dante; an epigraph references the Watchers, fallen angels in the Apocrypha who coupled with women to bring forth doomed children. It feels bolted on. More pertinent is the way the rapturous first meeting of M and F takes on the status of cherished family myth; here as so often, intense romance can also carry a distinct whiff of coercion. Whether Kit’s lengthy exculpatory address to her lover demonstrates a touching optimism, or simply reveals that she’s falling into the same trap of believing love conquers all, is a question that lies outside the scope of the novel.
The pleasure in Buchanan’s writing lies in her insightful phrases and shrewd observations. “Flashes of the night before arrived like emails I could not unsubscribe from”, Kit observes at one point. Her best friend, Andy, is “like a ladder at the deep end of the pool. I knew I could get myself out with my arms alone. But he meant I never had to.” The cold, simplified gaze of the teenager is well evoked. “Our school had no royalty. Our social lives were more like those of the gulls.” But 12 years later, Kit seems to have gained little in the way of mature insight. More interplay between the teenage and late-20s perspectives would have made The Sleep Watcher a richer experience, both thematically and structurally.
• The Sleep Watcher by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
