‘The tumult of youth’ [book review]

A review of Heatstroke by Hazel Barkworth

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There is a point in Heatstroke at which everything changes. It is strangely hard to pin it down, the exact moment, and it may well be different for every reader, but the sudden certainty that my nagging suspicion was correct came as something of a relief. Despite the discomfiting nature of the realisation, after grappling with her over many pages it was oddly reassuring to find that narrator Rachel wasn’t in fact as reliable as she seemed.

Heatstroke, by debut author Hazel Barkworth, is a clever and absorbing novel full of twists and turns that upset the traditional whodunit model and instead offer a darkly tangled exploration of motherhood, first love, desire and obsession. Hearing that the plot centres on the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl, Lily, who is at first thought abducted but then proves to have run away of her own accord, readers might well expect the major themes of the book to revolve around her story, yet Barkworth cleverly shifts them outwards, mapping them instead on to forty-year-old Rachel, a teacher at Lily’s school and mother of her best friend, Mia. The desire and obsession, the jealousy and trust issues are all Rachel’s to contend with, not Lily’s, as she realises where and with whom the missing teenager is and begins to question her own relationships with her husband, daughter and colleagues.

Giving away the key plot points would spoil a novel that does rely on mystery to keep the reader hooked, but fortunately there are other things to talk about here. Though Heatstroke is far from a crime novel, Barkworth certainly has the skills to write a successful one – she continually drip-feeds the reader with the information we think we want (Lily’s whereabouts and the identity of her companion do not remain a secret for long), only to pull the rug from under our feet when we aren’t looking. The realisation that Rachel, whom we have thus far trusted as a sensible, if perhaps rather inward-looking narrator, is in fact relying a little too heavily on what she thinks she knows – or, worse, wants to be true – suddenly shifts our perspective, making us re-examine the novel’s events in a sobering light. Rachel’s mothering, or lack thereof, and the all-consuming jealousy she seems to feel for her daughter and her friends, is an unsettling lens through which to view a plot that itself revolves around thorny issues like trust and consent.

A drawback, of course, of such a narrow perspective – though written in the third person, we are intimately bound to Rachel’s thoughts and viewpoint – is that many of the novel’s other characters appear to fall a little by the wayside. In fact, I suspect that much of this is deliberate: Barkworth is careful to present us only with Rachel’s warped point of view, and so even her own daughter, Mia, seems at times to be a caricature of a teenager, her friends and muscular boyfriend also two-dimensional. Only in Rachel’s imagination is Lily allowed to flesh out a little, though even her experiences are filtered through Rachel’s own dissatisfaction and barely hidden desire to return to her teenage self, to ‘the tumult of youth’. Conversely, at the end of the novel – a denouement that perhaps tries to do a little too much, offering drama and redemption all in one – Mia suddenly steps out of her previous role to become her own person, while Lily is reduced to a princess-like figure, fawned over by a troop of all-but-identical hangers-on.

This final glimpse of Lily is unsettling in a novel that is so much about sexuality and bodies, particularly those of women. This is a marked theme from the very first scene, in which Rachel studies her daughter lying on a sun lounger in a way that seems more sexual than anything else. Throughout the novel she is much concerned with clothes and appearance, obsessed by the teenagers’ make-up rituals and wedded to photos, while desire and love are put firmly in the realm of the corporeal: ‘It was the first time she’d ever felt like she was a body; not a person in a body.’ It is disturbing, this, but also effective: the endless parade of eyes and hair and clothes and skin.

The claustrophobic narrative perspective that gives us this distorted view of things and allows Barkworth to hide Rachel’s unreliability for as long as she does is mirrored well by the crushing atmosphere from which the book takes its title. Set during the final weeks of the summer term, Heatstroke oozes sapping heat and is filled with lush, sensual prose. Though at times a little over the top – the setting is suburban Surrey, after all – this exaggeration of the heat could be blamed partly on Rachel’s heightened senses and tendency to over-dramatize events (including a heatwave). Overall, it creates an absorbing sense of setting that pulls the reader into the story and adds to the feeling of slight discomfort.

While some of the darker themes of this book – emotional manipulation, abuse of power and consent – are big and therefore don’t have the space to be explored as fully as they perhaps ought to be, Barkworth has done well to twist a certain literary style on its head, drawing out themes from unexpected places and writing a confident, original debut. Atmospheric, gripping and pacey (this last despite the languor that seeps from the pages), Heatstroke is a novel that will stand strong long after summer begins to fade.

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Heatstroke by Hazel Barkworth is published in paperback by Headline on 27 May 2021. Many thanks to the publisher and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for kindly organising a review copy and space on the blog tour.