Who are You?

Imagine... you have a fever, perhaps malaria. You live in the tropics, Burma or India. Add to the fever a smouldering paranoia, a drug-induced hallucination creeping in from the subconscious which infects the way you see and understand people and atmospheres, and you will have experienced Kavans unusual and disturbing mind at work. This is a slice of domestic nightmare set in the tropics, both horribly unreal because of its peculiar intensity and horribly real in the dysfunction and hate of a mismatched couple whose lives exist in a monstrous monotony of repetition, boredom and utter loss of purpose. Mr Dog Head and the girl are the unequal couple: she is the intellectual, sensitive and unsure. He is brutish, a destroyer of womens souls, an empty drinker, a man twice her age who rapes her and swipes at the rats with a tennis racquet as they run through the rooms. The couple cannot connect... save in the wary animal-like way he watches and hates her, and in her ever-silent response. He does not know who he is around her, or what he wants. He is a clockwork beast ranging in a sweltering relationship hell. And she is also stuck, unable to get out of this role. The story is repeated, the scene changing little as if the movement required to alter life is too hard. But even a tiny difference can have a big effect. And it does. The book is strangeness itself, a monochrome negative on the one hand, but simultaneously bursting with lurid agonising colour on the other. The violence may not be graphic but it shudders on every page: the pre-monsoon skies, the plotting servants, the prison of a house for both jailer and jailed who are tied in soulless extremis until one of them manages to stop the mechanism and make a bid for freedom. The only bit of normality is in the figure of Suede Boots, a young man who visits the girl, is banned from the house, and urges her to escape. Mysterious and page-turning with a migrainous intensity, Kavan raises up the infinite question, Who are you?, the cry of the brain-fever birds outside, deafening, screaming, crazy. Fascinating inner territory with no map. (Kirkus UK)