Storming the literary scene
Cool young thing Kate Tempest adds novelist to her impressive list of occupations, and her debut is a lyrical delight, finds Sarah Chandler.
Performance poet, playwright, rapper, and now novelist, Kate Tempest is earning a reputation as something of a Zeitgeist illuminator. At least, a lot of people think the 30-year-old South Londoner is pretty cool.
Tempest’s debut novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, not only confirms she’s cool; it provides her the space and form to show she’s well-tuned in to human nature in all its strange layers and ambiguities.
The book centres around the intersecting lives of three 20-somethings trying to make a life in South London: Becky, Harry, and Pete (who will already be familiar to fans of Tempest’s music as the love triangle trio in her Everybody Down concept album).
Harry, a woman with an androgynous name and an androgynous bent, is an unlikely looking drug dealer and sister to over-educated but underemployed Pete.
Pete’s dating Becky, a dancer who sells ‘‘happy ending’’ massages on the side to fund her art.
But Harry’s met Becky quite independently of Pete, and they are negotiating their own budding romance.
Their relationships might be messy, and the way they make a buck often perilous, but Tempest presents their gritty lives to us boldly and entirely without judgment, as if to say to the reader, ‘Hey, they do what they do. Extend them your empathy here.’
The novel includes long accounts of the trio’s parents’ and grandparents’ histories. In the hands of a less talented writer these back stories could be potentially tedious diversions from the plot, but rather surprisingly they make up some of the most compelling parts of the book.
The now matters to Tempest, but so does the past; we learn as much about Becky, for example, through the stories about her troubled parents – a political activist father and a depressed photographer mother – as we do from anything she tells us about herself.
Tempest, who won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2012, sure has a way with words, describing a freckled complexion as being ‘‘like a pear on the turn’’, and recycling some of her best rap lines in the novel: ‘‘One man’s flash of lightning ripping through the air, is another’s passing glare, hardly there.’’
Interviewed on Radio New Zealand last year, Tempest told Kim Hill that she’s interested in how we can make true connections in an age where, although we’re ostensibly more connected than ever, ‘‘the culture of the individual has left us in despair’’.
In The Bricks That Built the Houses Tempest explores this and other modern dilemmas with her characteristic combination of lyrical energy and honesty.
Highly recommended.