This young novelist’s experiments have already run out of road
“I opened the door and there he was, / my brother / his face carefully neutral.” It has been six years since Rosa, the narrator of Rebecca Watson’s second novel, last saw him. These opening lines reveal immediately that the visit is unexpected; that her visitor is striving for a kind of care, in the face of what Rosa calls the “affront” of his mere presence. And, as in Watson’s debut, Little Scratch – shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and Desmond Elliott Prize in 2021 – the words convey only part of the page’s intent. They’re set more like poetry, using white space, justification and italics to reproduce the polyphony, and often contradictory nature, of action set against thought.
I Will Crash expands and contracts around this sibling connection. Little Scratch took place over the course of a single day; this story is set over less than a week, Wednesday to Sunday, the days laid out as markers. Watson is deeply aware of how time can slow with attention, that no moment is too small to be observed and considered and held up to the light. Rosa’s encounter, it turns out, is a haunting prologue: soon afterwards, she learns by phone that her brother has died in a car crash.
The news immediately caroms, as it would, against her memory of him once threatening to drive their car off the road when she wouldn’t put him in touch with her friend Alice. His blunt insistence – “Give me her number or I’ll crash the car” – was followed by action: “Accelerating then. / Jerking across / the painted dashes on the road. / No one coming, only emphasising our vulnerability.”
Rosa’s recollection of her tormented relationship with her brother – never named, as the narrator of Little Scratch remained nameless – bleeds into her present grief. Her boyfriend John, a calm and understanding academic, soothes her but also lets her be; she struggles to get in touch with her mother (the siblings’ parents are long-divorced); she finds solace in her friendship with Sarah; and she calls up the memory of Alice, the schoolfriend she feared her violent brother would harm. As in Little Scratch, sexual violence and the threat of sexual, or sexualised, violence permeates the narrative. Both of Watson’s books can be read as examinations of the search for safety, how women in particular might find a space – however momentary, even if only over a cup of coffee with a friend – that’s free of danger.
It’s a worthy subject for consideration; yet, as the story goes on, that becomes a problem. The subject alone is not enough: our focus is too much on Rosa’s situation, and not sufficiently on Rosa herself. While the structure of Watson’s work is at least superficially adventurous, her language itself is almost unremittingly flat: see that “emphasising our vulnerability” above.
At one point, Rosa considers how, if she had her teenage years again, she would act differently: “I’d tell people when I liked them / I’d know the effect of saying what I wanted / that anyone can inspire feeling / I didn’t need to like the look of my face or / my body or the tone of my voice to / conjure want”. It’s impossible to find fresh observation, a new sense of an environment, in this. Watson’s prose too often has the scent of the obvious.
Little Scratch made an impact because its author was clearly stretching herself: the danger here is that we only get more of the same. All of life is never internal. John’s area of academic interest is the work of Gertrude Stein: a bold and shape-changing writer, yes, but I wondered what this information would add. John, for his part, tells Rosa that what’s “interesting” about Stein “are the gaps in her writing, and in how she spoke about herself”. This opinion, like too much of the novel, is simply anodyne. It’s time for Watson to turn in a new direction. By looking out as well as in, she’ll find new worlds to explore.
I Will Crash is published by Faber & Faber at £14.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
