“Money was not to be expected, he said without embarrassment, but there would be perks: artists dropping by, gallerists on the phone, free books, the chance of my name in print.” Anyone who works freelance in the creative industries – the arts, the media, publishing – will identify with the protagonist of History Keeps Me Awake at Night, a woman in her late 20s whose art history degree and masters in journalism has got her exactly nowhere in the real world of contemporary London.
Unpublished freelance assignments, unpaid internships, unreal city of fancy cocktails at The Connaught and posh soirées at the in-laws: “I knew they could smell the red-brick on me, could sense that port gave me a headache, that I drank sherry only when Nat’s father handed it round after church on Christmas Eve, and that I couldn’t tell a court from a quad.”
Originally from a single-parent household in South Africa, Margit is one of the legion of expats who call London home. Married to fellow expat Nat, an American barrister, she is surrounded by friends and colleagues who have got their lives in order while she remains adrift, struggling to make sense of her place in the world.
Complementing this woman’s-search-for-meaning narrative is another search narrative, less abstract but equally difficult, concerning 43 missing Mexican students, a 2014 news story that Margit happens upon by accident. She quickly channels her aimlessness into an obsession with the story, researching online and in library archives, using Google maps to virtually trace the route the students, from Guerrero, were taking to the capital Mexico City for an annual protest to mark the anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, before the bus they had commandeered was ambushed by police.
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With its blend of fact and fiction, History Keeps Me Awake at Night holds its own among other notable books of the genre in recent years such as Gabriela Ybarra’s The Dinner Guest, which was nominated for the International Booker Prize, or What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, an engaging debut about the ravages of illness and apartheid. Christy Edwall’s Margit is a convincing narrator for the genre; she has the cool detachment of journalistic training, the observant eye of the novelist, the wry voice of the outsider in a London she can’t quite access.
Further enlivening the text are pinpoint portraits of the people she meets along the way: “Helen lived enchantedly, so it was only fair that she envied the struggles of the disenchanted, whose scars and deprivations made them permanent, multi-dimensional works of art themselves … ‘What can she be living on?’ he said with a touch of intrigue notionally thrown in my direction, but he was really only talking to his own gathered selves.”
Born in South Africa in 1985, Edwall lives in Brighton. She has a doctorate in English literature from Oxford and her writing has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly. On the one hand, her debut is a conventional, voice-led novel about the trials of modern life for young women that will appeal to fans of Naoise Dolan, Megan Nolan and Raven Leilani. The insets of the story of the “desaparecidos” elevate the personal narrative to a degree, giving a layered effect thematically and showing the narrator’s desperation to make use of her formidable intellect, even if her investigation from her London apartment is, as a straight-talking Mexican journalist notes, “‘not just insulting, it’s impossible. It’s like a kid from Chiapas who decides he’ll prove that the royal family killed Princess Diana’”.
Less successful are the transitions from reportage to reflection, particularly early in the book. There are multiple references to note-taking, or awkward “as I read over what I had written” segues. Within this framework, it’s hard to care about the opinions of various writers and journalists that are quoted throughout, but as the narrative progresses these disparate parts cohere to a compelling whole. The question that sustains the book is not whether Margit will solve the mystery of the missing students, rather whether her marriage will survive her obsession with the case. Along the way, she realises “that [her husband] had an investigation of his own, that he was investigating the disappearance of desire”.
At one point, Nat links his wife’s detective work to unresolved traumas in her past, getting short shrift from Margit, but the reader has already made this connection. Margit’s personal history could equally inform the book’s title. Her vivacious, inscrutable mother Nina had a one-night stand with a married Englishman, which left Margit without a father, a hole that may never be filled. Towards the end of the book, a nicely underplayed phone call from the man’s wife decades later begins to pull the pieces of the mystery together. The legacy of what might have been – it’s enough to keep anyone awake at night.
