Heatwaves are a disruptive force in literature, setting the scene for transformative acts of transgression as inhibitions are cast off. The effect is felt particularly keenly in the ordinarily temperate English countryside – just think of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, Ian McEwan’s Atonement or, indeed, Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave. To that list can now be added K Patrick’s debut novel, a striking queer romance in which lust yields subtle revelations about sexual power and selfhood.
The dislocation of soaring temperatures is enhanced by its unnamed protagonist’s outsider status. At 22, she’s a butch lesbian from Australia who is still exploring her gender identity when she’s appointed matron at a very British girls’ boarding school governed by arcane rules and rituals. Everything feels alien to her, including her hunger for the headteacher’s wife, the eponymous Mrs S.
“Her face tricks me into familiarity, lifted from a painting, a feminine ideal,” she notes. Lingering gazes and the brush of fingertips build to a series of clandestine rendezvous that set the pages flying and give rise to some passages of intense eroticism.
Ultimately, however, forbidden love proves secondary to the drama of the narrator’s self-discovery. Hers is a journey in which language isn’t a great deal of help. “Here is another word that doesn’t work,” she sighs inwardly when Mrs S asks her if she wears a chest binder to make herself more like a “man”. “To talk it through, to use language as it is already known, requires how I feel to be in a fixed state. It isn’t. A self is always on the move.”
As if to reinforce that, the narrative is stripped of names and dates. Is it set in the late 80s? Possibly. Such sustained opacity – with an absence of speech marks – could easily become a distraction, but Patrick compensates by pinning down with sensual specificity the episodes that shape the narrator’s evolving self.
It takes artfulness as well as conviction to pull off something so bold, and it marks the author out as a distinctive new talent. Meanwhile, there’s that heat: steamy, sticky, torrid.
Mrs S by K Patrick is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
