The unnamed narrator of William Rayfet Hunter’s debut novel, a mixed-race aspiring musician from Manchester, is plunged into an unfamiliar milieu when his posh university friend, Lily, invites him to spend a summer at her parents’ chateau in the French countryside. There’s an undercurrent of unease – at one point he is mistaken for staff – but the family are welcoming. Lily’s bisexual brother, Felix, a handsome actor and enfant terrible who has just emerged from a stint in the Priory, is especially friendly. A relationship develops, which brings perks for the narrator: Felix’s father gives him a cushy job at his property firm, and his mother promises to pull strings and get him an audition with the Royal Academy. It all seems too good to last – and so it proves.
Sunstruck is a story about identity and belonging. The protagonist had hung out with goth kids at school; his black best friend, Jasmine, teasingly nicknames him “WhiteBoy” because he is so out of touch with black pop culture. But when the action moves to London in the second half of the novel, and particularly after a black friend of Jasmine’s is badly beaten up by police at the Notting Hill carnival, a racial consciousness gradually awakens within him. He suspects that he’ll never be truly accepted in Felix’s world, and their relationship is troublingly imbalanced. Yet he can’t quite tear himself away: “The intoxicating sense of belonging, of moving through a space I didn’t know existed … this is something I cannot give up.”
Psychological damage from a traumatic childhood makes the narrator particularly susceptible to Felix’s charms. We learn, through a series of poignant flashbacks, that his mother suffered from severe mental health problems, and they have been estranged for many years. However, we get little sense of what makes him tick in the here and now; he’s something of a passenger in his own story, defined more by disconnectedness than any personality of his own. His outstanding traits are physical attractiveness and an agreeable manner, but these are not much good to the reader. The first-person voice is underwhelming company on the page, at one point musing tritely on the melancholia of birthdays. Lily’s siblings call her Magpie, “Because she collects beautiful things” – perhaps he is simply a himbo?
Luckily, there’s plenty of plot; the novel’s brisk pacing, together with its shrewd blend of emotional sincerity, brooding intrigue and political overtones, make for a lively beach read. The prose reads like a cross between an airport romance and a screenplay for a Saltburn-style television drama. Heightened emotions manifest, time and again, in intense sensations in the narrator’s chest. The characters in Lily and Felix’s milieu feel like stock types, alternating between blithe, jolly-hockey-sticks esprit and sociopathic coldness, and the descriptions of upper-class opulence have a similarly generic quality: a great many people and things “glitter” and “glow”; clothes, drinks and lovers are “expensive” or “expensive-looking”.
At times, the narrator himself seems to have half an eye on screen adaptation: “The shaft of light slides from my face to his” while the lovers cuddle; after an embrace, “our reflections blur inside the window”. Some moments are downright schlocky: “an instant, a flash of something like fury in Felix’s eyes … it flares and bursts like the filament in a camera bulb.”
Early on in Sunstruck, the narrator happens across the headless torso of an alabaster statue of Venus, the Roman goddess of love. Felix’s mother had made it, and Felix had decapitated it in a fit of rage – “A warning not to get in my son’s way,” she quips. Here is the novel in microcosm: the on-the-nose metaphor; the sinister, hiding-in-plain-sight menace; and our dozy, hapless hero, too mesmerised to heed the signs.
• Sunstruck by William Rayfet Hunter is published by Merky (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
