In an unnamed girls boarding school somewhere in England a group of teenage pupils known only as The Girls are recreating Guernica. Amid the carnage, body parts are lovingly detailed: “The soft triangle of a knee. A shin… We paint along the leg as if it is a wave.” It’s a novelist of rare daring who imbues the scene of a massacre with a furtive erotic charge. Mrs S, a Cubist painting in prose about a slow burn love affair between our narrator, a young Australian matron, and the eponymous wife of the headmaster, announces Patrick as a writer of undeniable talent. With nods to DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf it combines a present tense modernism with imagery so freighted with desire that even a pair of secateurs becomes an object of lust. A bravura exploration of the queer gaze.
Susannah Hoffs is talking about her novel This Bird Has Flown at the Kite Festival tomorrow. Read more about her story here. Last-minute tickets here.
Photograph Alice Zoo courtesy Granta
