Kae Tempest’s new novel is dedicated to “you”, the reader. It also comes with a plea: “Be gentle though.” But to whom or what should we be gentle? The book or the writer? Having Spent Life Seeking is Tempest’s second novel, arriving a decade after his first and following a period of considerable personal change, including gender transition. Perhaps inevitably, it is a book full of struggle and soul-searching. It is also painfully earnest: an enervating read with an exhausting intensity that neither relents nor resolves.
The publisher hasn’t helped here, bombastically announcing it as a “heart-breaking, soul-building new novel”. That’s a great deal to live up to, even for someone who established a reputation first as a blazingly fervent spoken-word poetry performer, winning the Ted Hughes award in 2013, and making Mercury prize-nominated albums in 2014 and 2017. But the grandeur of the publisher’s claims also suggests something of the melodramatic register of the book, which is all grand passion, big trauma and heroic self-discovery. What it lacks is any convincing sense of interiority or reflection.
The novel opens with 36-year-old Rothko Taylor, recently released after two decades in prison for a crime yet to be disclosed to us. Living in a van with a stray dog and picking up casual work, Rothko imagines a tentative future in which they might earn enough to “go private … Start on T” (testosterone). For now, they cut a solitary figure, struggling with automated supermarket checkouts and a longing “just to be touched”. Edgecliff, the bleak and bluntly named fictional seaside town in which the book is set, mirrors the novel’s own grim emotional terrain. Here Rothko must contend with their past, most pressingly in the form of Meg, their neglectful and substance-addicted mother, now in a care home with dementia
Tempest structures the novel simply, with a long flashback bridging the past to the present and filling in the backstory. At 15, Rothko struggles with their parents’ acrimonious divorce, uncertainties about their gender and a secret love affair with fellow teenager Dionne. Tempest’s prose is markedly lyrical throughout, as though he were determined to wrest beauty from the jaws of gritty realism. The issue is that his realism never feels real. Take Rothko’s jailtime, which is given thuddingly clunky treatment: “Jail had been a hard place for hard people who had seen hard things.”
But Rothko finds a community, both in jail and in the life they rebuild after it. Jail, like poverty, squalor, addiction and trauma, can be made beautiful, seems to be the suggestion. If Tempest lingers over the “clump of leaves, bird shit and slimy crisp packets” in a broken gutter, it is so that he might later present a counter vision of grace. “People needed beauty,” Rothko’s sister Sarai observes of Rothko, “Especially the ones who’d soaked up more than their share of ugliness. So the rest of us didn’t have to.” The sentiment that suffering might be a comparative economy and beauty its compensation is deeply unsettling. Later, Rothko seems to marvel at the self-harm scars on Dionne’s legs. This is romance for Rothko, but it’s also an uneasy read.
Trauma, of different kinds, is the book’s primary concern. But trauma in itself doesn’t constitute a plot. And it doesn’t follow that cataloguing the traumatic events of a life would be the best way to carry a reader into the experience of it. Part of the problem is that Tempest’s prose so readily slips into verse: fragmentary, sometimes facile. When Rothko descends into addiction, Tempest writes: “Rothko came to and the whole world was carnage. Monsters in the dark sniffing canisters of varnish.” Rather than elevating the prose, the rhymes feel glib and the sentiment vague, shorthand for an unspecified intensity: “They wanted things they couldn’t name; they wanted rest. They wanted change.”
Lines like “Days went by in a daze of Dionne” might work in a song but are mortifying as a sentence. Dionne herself is thinly drawn, a cool girl carrying tarot cards, a Rizla-rolling version of the manic pixie dream girl, tasked with redeeming the hero. Later, Tempest writes that “Rothko escaped their body when they vanished into Dionne’s. Her pleasure was their victory over the world that made them ashamed and never enough.” But here’s the problem. Rothko has no distinguishing qualities of their own other than their gender dysmorphia and unhappy childhood. Is a person only the sum of the things that happen to them? And is the solution really as simple as reviving a teenage love affair?
In the end, it is to Dionne that Rothko makes his declaration: “I’m a man.” Tempest marks the moment with a shift in pronoun from “they” to “he”, a gesture that carries genuine emotional weight. If it is difficult to honour Tempest’s request that readers “be gentle” with his book, it is nonetheless clear that this is a novel animated both by his own vulnerability and a wider sense of that among transmen and transwomen. And there’s certainly room for new novels to come that might be equal to the task of capturing the complexity of that experience with sensitivity and power.
• Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
