Strange Fruit

The first taste of Eliza Robertson’s phrases in Demi- Gods is like an unknown and pleasurable fruit: a splash of sensation in your mouth, sometimes revelatory, sometimes not so much. But the pleasure of the sensation never quite goes away. The evocative first novel’s characters are imprinted on your subconscious as they are on each other’s. The two young brothers, Kenneth and Patrick, stars of the novel’s plot, with the sun on them, their bodies hard and tan like peanuts, eyes chlorine blue, remain as vivid as in this image on the very first page, over the decades that the book spans. Robertson holds the experience of girlhood in a muscular grip, deftly moving it through the break of a marriage, sibling relationships, young lust and barely comprehended desires. The sections of the book stand taut and yet seamlessly span one shape- shifting decade in the lives of Willa and her sister, and her mother’s boyfriend’s sons, through Willa’s eyes. In sparse yet rich description of person, place and moment—‘ hips that softened over summer’, ‘ breasts packed into last year’s bras’— Robertson is able to hold the reader suspended over a very specific experience of growing up, introducing by turn nostalgia, and the lack of control and the bizarre cruelty of adolescent imperatives. The novel’s strength is its dramatic tension, which elevates its episodes to luminous pieces of life, each of which we are able to understand as shaping the characters selves. As they engage in their intense, relentless, interactions, we watch them grow, lust, resent, hurt and flounder as if under a microscope, as if in vivid technicolor. Sadly, the novel does not live up to the expectation that it builds. I guess one aspect of ageing is that the future grows limited, says the now middle- aged narrator in the last section of the book. Sadly, this narrowing of potential leaves a final aftertaste of disappointment.