First Novels

Katharine Kilalea is a South African poet who has written a startlingly good first novel. OK, Mr Field (Faber, £12.99) is the haunting story of a concert pianist whose wrist is fractured in a train crash. On a whim, he uses his compensation money to buy a house that he has only seen in pictures. If that sounds dull, this might be because it is hard to convey the shocking accuracy of Kilalea’s prose, which, ultimately, is what makes this novel so riveting. The absolute correctness of the vocabulary she uses makes one realise how pretentious and unnecessary the language in much contemporary fiction is.

This would be nothing, of course, if Kilalea didn’t have anything to say, but she has so much to convey about loneliness, madness and mortality. The literary critic Harold Bloom has said that what makes Kafka’s Metamorphosis so disorientating is its strange familiarity, and OK, Mr Field has this by the bucketload. This curious, short (it is just 200 pages long) book feels as uncanny as Kafka or Beckett.

Max Field, Kilalea’s protagonist (if you can call him such, given his passivity) is clearly disturbed: his thought processes are dissociated and his mind can’t make sense of what he sees and experiences. This detachment is often funny. Looking at his naked wife, Field reflects, ‘I liked looking at her. It wasn’t the nudity that attracted me, there was just something about her body which my eye liked, or had at least taken an interest in. And so it was, scanning her figure with a lazy and purposeless kind of attention, that my eyes came across her slightly goofy-looking large brown nipples.’ Alarmingly, he is discomfited by the nipples that belong to his wife because of their ‘indifference, which seemed to see things in the way that children seem to see things when they stare at you on buses’.