Every teenager feels a sense of estrangement as they migrate from childhood to adult life through a cascade of intense emotions that may never again flame so brightly. For Kit, a 16-year-old living with her family in a small English seaside town, the outsider feeling is especially vivid. It starts with terrible dreams that shake her body and then, “my mind separated from my body as completely as an egg cracked from a shell”.
She had awoken on the floor, which wasn’t unusual, and walked downstairs to witness her father and mother, mostly referred to in the text as F and M, having a disagreement. M sweeps past her on her way to bed and F ignores his daughter’s waving hands in front of his face. She screams their names but there’s still no reaction. She returns to the room she shares with her younger brother Leo and sees herself still sleeping in bed.
So begins a series of out-of-body experiences, a term she finds on the internet, where she visits the house of her boyfriend, Andrew, and watches her parents as their marriage starts to disintegrate after her father tries to persuade her mother to dance but pushes things too far. She also sees her parents making love, which is enough to give anyone nightmares, but their physicality proves more disturbing still: “I knew the words – Bondage, Dominance, Sadomasochism.”
Kit’s nocturnal separations – although they’re not strictly limited to the night-time – can be seen as a metaphor for a young woman’s awakenings; at the same time, she decides to lose her virginity with Andrew, who is as childlike as her father. They can also be viewed as a defence mechanism against the revelation that the adult world is more fractured and damaged than she could have imagined. Watching your parents’ marriage dissolve is certainly enough to give anyone pause.
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As the novel is told retrospectively by an older Kit, it may also be her way of dealing with what happens to her family once things fall apart. Whatever way the reader chooses to look at it, Buchanan has delivered a powerful meditation on the realisations that come with adolescence.
