“They f--k you up, your Mum and Dad,” Philip Larkin wrote. They’re usually also capable of driving you f---ing crazy, as this wry debut novel from Camilla Barnes beautifully illustrates.
Miranda, a “competent but uninspired French actress” who’s not quite 50, lives in Paris, from where she feels compelled to travel regularly into the countryside to check on her recalcitrant parents. This eccentric, contradictory, bickering pair live in a dilapidated house with two adopted llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats and a large freezer full of ancient food.
Her father is a lanky, mildly morose, retired professor of philosophy: he likes to wrangle pedantically about language, and never loses an argument. Her mother, who ploughs through life like a battleship, refuses to throw anything away and likes to bring conversation back to the war, although she was born after it ended. After 50 years of marriage, this pair are “set in their ways, like Mallory in the ice. It was a game of stubbornness versus pedantry and it was pointless trying to intervene.” The best Miranda can do is e-mail her frustrations, and “the usual desire to kill” them, to her elder sister Charlotte, her competent and efficient polar opposite.
The Usual Desire to Kill unfolds gently. For a while one wonders what, exactly, the plot is, bar the bickering back and forth of these two ageing eccentrics. But it’s impossible not to be drawn into Barnes’s writing, in which characters and situations are observed in sparing, vivid sentences that immediately conjure up a sense of place and person. It would, she writes, “have taken the same amount of plasticine to make either of them, but rolled out differently. Mum was like a piece of low-slung Victorian furniture: chubby cushions, thick brocade, dark wooden arms and too heavy to move on your own.” Dad “felt responsible for all the animals that lived in La Forgerie, but the responsibility was that of a butler and not a master. He didn’t interfere in their lives in the same way he didn’t interfere in his daughters’ lives.”
Anyone whose parents are ageing and stuck in their ways will recognise the to-ing and fro-ing of a couple who’ve been together for so long that they’ve become utterly co-dependent, even if they’ve also come to slightly despise each other. “I haven’t read the Cromwell yet,” Miranda’s father protests, when his wife tries to pass onto their daughter a doorstep-thick biography of the man. “‘Yes you have,’ countered Mum. ‘You enjoyed it.’” Dad breaks coffee cups and hides them at the bottom of the outside bin so Mum won’t find out; Mum insists on serving up ancient, unidentifiable meats from the freezer from 1983 for dinner. Their behaviour is both frustrating and hilariously funny in Barnes’s dry hands.
But gradually she reveals their backstory, and we start to see them in a different light. Miranda’s mother becomes a more sympathetic character when we learn about who she was as a young, naive and lonely student, writing to an imaginary sister in her diary. Her father, we see, has never really grown out of the gaucheness of his adolescence: he doesn’t really know how to interact with other people, especially those of whom he’s fond. The pair were utterly ill-equipped for the tragedy that befell them in their early years together, and have spent the subsequent years avoiding it, with ripples of consequence for every member of the family.
It was Barnes’s more famous uncle Julian, to whom she used to write gossipy family e-mails, who suggested she should write a book. Her parents really are eccentric characters living in rural France – her father is the philosopher Jonathan Barnes – and, as she told the Telegraph in a recent interview, when they read the novel, they received it with varying degrees of froideur.
Julian Barnes’s suggestion was a good one, whatever his niece’s parents think. The characters in this novel made me smile, and laugh, and grit my teeth in recognition. But while I recognised them, felt sympathetic towards them, I didn’t root for them; and while the slow reveal of the backstory provided a resolution of sorts, it felt like an uneasy one. Perhaps that’s because, in life, there is no tidy resolution. Just the small ups and downs, and occasionally, the usual desire to kill.
The Usual Desire to Kill is published by Scribner at £16.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books