The naked body in the pool

Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted novel has, at first sight, all the ingredients of a standard villa holiday-from-Hell story, or indeed film. But this creepy and unsettling tale has more layers to it than most.

Two couples, famous poet Joe Jacobs and his foreign correspondent wife Isabel and their friends, fat Mitchell and tall Laura, share a villa outside Nice for a sweltering summer in 1994. Joe and Isabel’s 14-year-old daughter Nina is the uncomfortable and bored observer of the grown-ups’ bickering, and of rapidly surfacing misery.

Mitchell is in a permanent rage, which takes the form of shooting and trapping any animal he can lay his hands on — it turns out that their business has gone bust and his life is rapidly disintegrating. Joe’s real name is Jozef Nowogrodzki; he has been haunted all his life by the loss of his parents and young sister in the Holocaust. Isabel has been semi-absent from the family for years, disappearing for months on end to report the horrors of contemporary wars, leaving him to bring up Nina alone.

Joe, an unfaithful husband, associates Isabel’s neglect of her daughter with his own abandonment by his parents, but ‘he understood that it made more sense of her life to be shot at in war zones than lied to by him in the safety of her own home’. So there’s plenty of guilt all round.

A deranged and beautiful girl called Kitty Finch breaks into this less than idyllic scene and becomes the catalyst for a tragic chain of events. She first appears floating naked in the swimming pool. Isabel invites her to stay, inexplicably, given Joe’s philandering habits: it seems she is looking for an excuse to leave him finally. Kitty is there for two reasons: she is stalking Joe, with whom she feels a close, almost mystical, affinity, and wants him to read her poem (called ‘Swimming Home’).