Anyone who knew of Imogen West-Knights as one half of the pitch-perfect satirical Twitter account Bougie London Literary Woman might have made assumptions about how her first novel would look: perhaps a smart, witty comedy skewering pretensions in the world of media or publishing. Deep Down is something altogether darker; an examination of the legacy of abuse shot through with sharp wit and compassion.
Twentysomething siblings Billie and Tom are thrown together in Paris in the immediate aftermath of their father’s sudden death. Tom, the elder, is working there in an English-themed pub, avoiding the failure of his acting career (“not knowing what he is doing in Paris feels more productive than not knowing at home”). Billie has an internship at a PR company that she hates. Her boyfriend’s father talks to her “as though she is someone with dreams and ambitions. She doesn’t have these.” Both are drifting, distant from each other and their mother, until this death shakes to the foundation the defences they have built over the years against the violence of their family history.
Intermittent scenes show episodes from this history that allow the reader glimpses of the threat that shadowed Tom and Billie through childhood. What West-Knights does so effectively here is to make no distinction between past and present; incidents from childhood are related in the same continuous present tense as the current events in Paris, with nothing so clunky as dates or chapter headings to mark the switch. Tom and Billie’s memories, vivid with the clarity that childhood shame or fear can retain, are therefore presented with the same immediacy as the days of limbo between death and funeral. West-Knights is also skilful in her depiction of domestic abuse, rarely showing it directly; the potential for an outburst, and the way the children learn to recognise the warning signs, is more chilling than any description of a punch thrown.
The climax of the book is a visit by Tom and Billie, along with Tom’s workmates, to the Paris catacombs, in a somewhat heavy-handed metaphor for the hero’s descent to the underworld to confront the monster. The nature of monsters is a subtle thread running through the novel. Billie and her mother, Lisa, steadfastly refer to their father’s “illness”; it is left to Tom to voice the unsayable: “Maybe the only thing that was actually wrong with him was that he was a bad person.”
The narrative voice is fluent and assured, with an eye for detail and original images: a cup of tea is “crunchy with limescale”; clearing up after one of their father’s rages is “rebuilding the set on which their performance of normal life takes place”. The subterranean climax introduces a note of the uncanny that doesn’t quite convince, and the ending feels unresolved, though perhaps this is in keeping with the idea that the “möbius strip” of complex grief does not allow for tidy closure. But Deep Down is an accomplished debut from a writer who is equally adept at handling comedy and tragedy, and the blurred edges between the two.
• Deep Down by Imogen West-Knights is published by Fleet (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
