Toby Lloyd’s slow burn of a debut novel is in the tradition of the pentagonal family saga, a subgenre that might include Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Add to this formula the elements of religious mysticism, ethnicity (in this case Jewishness), and an exploration of the ethics around using family as material for literature, and you should have a truly combustible mix.
The five members of the Rosenthal clan are as different and conflicted as Franzen’s Lamberts. Mother Hannah is a high-powered journalist who writes about “religious obligations” and “gender roles” for the rightwing press, while father Eric is a gentle, religiously observant barrister. Eldest son Gideon is gay and leaves to do military service in Israel, while the youngest boy, Tovyah, begins his first term at Oxford having always been “coddled ... shy, knowledgeable, defensive when provoked”.
But it’s the middle child, Elsie, initially a “perfect daughter”, who becomes consumed by teenage anguish and more mysterious forces, and who ends up being the black hole into which the family are eventually dragged. When she goes missing from the Rosenthals’ north London home, aged 14, she is discovered five days later disturbingly changed: “The girl who came back was not the same girl who went missing.”
Elsie’s disappearance occurs soon after the death of her paternal Polish grandfather, Yosef. After being tracked down to the Norfolk coast, she’s put into therapy and prescribed antidepressants. But this is no ordinary adolescent breakdown. Worryingly for her parents, Elsie has been taking ideas from the Kabbalah and discovering “ancient techniques for communing with the dead”.
Meanwhile, Hannah begins writing a book about Yosef’s time in Treblinka, which reveals her father-in-law was in fact a Sonderkommando, a Jewish prisoner forced, on pain of death, to collaborate in the Holocaust. By the time it’s published, the whole family is angry. Entitled Gehinnom and Afterwards (from the Hebrew word for hell), it becomes a bestseller. To make matters worse, her follow-up is a memoir about Elsie, Daughters of Endor, in which she accuses Elsie of being a witch, “a girl waylaid by demonic influences”. Outraged, Tovyah spits: “It’s not easy having a writer for a mother ... all the shit of life at home, just sitting on the shelf in Waterstones.”
Much of the novel’s action is conveyed in the first person by Tovyah’s undergraduate friend Kate, a narrative choice that has the effect of allowing us to see the Rosenthals from an objective distance, but also of othering them somewhat. Kate is half Jewish (though not on the matrilineal side that counts), and her encounters with Hannah spark a discussion of antisemitism, which appears shockingly alive and well at Oxford. After Daughters of Endor is published, a swastika is painted on Tovyah’s door. Hannah and Kate’s contretemps over anti-Zionism versus antisemitism precipitates a lecture on the history of persecution, all of which feels extremely potent and relevant after the events of 7 October 2023 in Israel.
All is set for an epic showdown when Kate visits the Rosenthal house with Elsie present. Yet the book’s sense of propulsion is impeded by odd structural choices. A tense Oxford interview, in which Tovyah fiercely debates which modernist writers were antisemitic, is undermined by the fact we know he gets in. There’s also an eight-page retelling by a rabbi of the story of Jephthah, which loses the reader. And the closing confrontation at a strained Shabbat dinner during which Elsie shows her supernatural powers fails to take flight. The novel’s combustible elements don’t catch light until – in a literal sense – the final pages.
The problem is that Elsie, while being the most interesting character, is largely a mediated, elusive presence. Lloyd’s ambitious, fragmented narrative strategy doesn’t quite coalesce, though the novel is never less than deeply immersive. Struggling to get out is a compelling, Rothian tragedy of family dysfunction along the lines of American Pastoral, but here the modus operandi rather defeats the undeniably explosive material. Having said that, Fervour is written with a rare precision, and lingers in the mind long after reading. The quality of Lloyd’s prose alone ensures that anything he writes next will be worth investigating.
• Fervour by Toby Lloyd is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• Jude Cook’s second novel, Jacob’s Advice, was published by Unbound in 2020.
