Father Figure opens with a memory of murders, bought and paid for; then skips briskly to scholarship girl Gail, who is on the verge of being expelled from her expensive London academy for writing a scandalous essay. The connection between death and day school is new girl Agata, the daughter of notoriously corrupt East End businessman Ezra Levy.
Ezra, a man who takes phone calls from Putin, buys football clubs and has had people killed, wants more for Agata than he had when young. Her anorexia is killing her, and he, “fleshy and stupid”, can’t stop it. Gail sets her sights on Ezra: part compulsion, part seduction, an adolescent power game taken to dangerous conclusions.
Gail’s mother, Dar, wants to make it clear that they are a very different sort of Jewish from Ezra. Ezra, Dar believes, is bad for Britain and bad for Jewish people. A pro-Palestinian activist for whom Israel is “a KICK ME sticker”, Dar isn’t sure about Ashkenazim (too much therapy, not enough booze) and “suspicious of Hassidim ... booking flights that took off on Saturdays so she’d never have to sit next to them”. Is Dar antisemitic? Gail worries she might be. And Dar worries about Gail all the time: the mother-daughter relationship is close, troubled and finely drawn.
Precocious Gail is the kind of 16-year-old who writes long, thoughtful letters to George Michael. They begin simply – “Dear George … what exactly happens in cottaging?”– and progress, as Gail’s dangerous infatuation with Ezra builds, to “Dear George … I looked like a teenage girl in a pornographic magazine. He didn’t see that. But I did.” The one-sided nature of the correspondence evokes exactly the never-enough feeling of adolescence. The conceit is charming and funny, if a little underdeveloped.
The year is 2015 but, with minor tweaks, the novel could be set 10 years later or 50 before. Adolescence, and the hot, hungry nature of it, doesn’t change much. The teenage girl, in Forrest’s capable and unusual fifth novel, is a kind of bottomless pit of need – for desire, attention and the world to come. Agata, seriously ill, attempts to wrest back control from Ezra and her doting stepmother; Faith, Gail’s one-time lover and former best friend, breaks away from Gail by flirting with a whole cohort of teenage boys on Hampstead Heath; and Gail herself is unstoppable. “I fellated a Cypriot fruiterer at the apex of Parliament Hill,” begins her controversial essay.
The teenage girl is also a thing mostly beyond adult understanding, and certainly beyond adult intervention, which here only serves to complicate matters further. This is a book that seeks to complicate everything it possibly can. From the sexual agency of teenage girls to bigotry among billionaires, mental illness, murder, protest, queerness, and the obviously thorny question of Israeli-Palestinian relations, Father Figure thrives as an exploration of grey areas. As a novelist, Forrest tends to reserve judgment: her characters are not likable, but they are tender. They feel things very deeply, and Forrest treats each one with distinction. You could never mistake them for anyone else.
The same is true of Forrest’s prose, the rhythm always half a beat from where you think it will land. The overall effect is of a kind of faux-naivety, even a childlike desire to spell things out, to have clarity at all costs (“Faith swam back and forth between the child and the mother, unsure of who could better advance her needs, because she still didn’t know what her needs were”). And yet the contrast between this plain tell-don’t-show approach, and the complex nuances of Forrest’s plot, characters and morality systems creates a kind of literary twilight zone in which anything is possible. It feels like being told a story by a liar. Or by a precocious teenager.
Forrest’s adolescent ventriloquism is a gift deployed powerfully here. Being able to avoid the school loos, for example, is a “more valuable talent than being able to hold your breath under water”; the only girl more unloved than Gail is “Fat Lilah”; the resentment of Gail for her mother is matched only by Dar’s desperation to understand her daughter. “Living in the era where mothers could track their children digitally,” Dar muses, “only made her daughter’s emotional secrecy more challenging to accept.”
The novel twists in the final third: from a meditation on older men and betrayal, it becomes a breathtaking gallop into something significantly closer to a thriller. This is fairly unexpected, but not at all unwelcome. A plot! In a literary coming-of-age story! Nothing, in Forrest’s writing, is ever simple. Things are deceptive, untidy and uneasy – and happen when you least expect it. Actions have consequences, and those consequences can change the shape of everything – which is, I suppose, always the true lesson of adolescence. And the true, tricky, slippery lesson of Forrest’s novel.
• Father Figure by Emma Forrest is published by W&N (£18.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
