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Two years ago Derek Owusu was included on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, a once-in-a-decade celebration of our brightest literary talent.
He wasn’t so sure. “Granta said I was one of the futures of British novel writing. It didn’t feel like that,” reads the headline on an article he wrote for GQ. The young, Black, working-class author of experimental fiction had looked on as the literary world’s response to the list “was one of dismissal and disapproval”, with critics paying little attention to the writers’ work and “more about what the cohort ‘signified’ about the shape and direction of British literature”.
Such an experience would make some want to disappear from publishing altogether. Gladly, Borderline Fiction, Owusu’s third novel, shows the author hasn’t let it alter his pursuit of crafting the mind-bending fiction his listing recognised in the first place.
Much of the novel is harsh and frenetic, with drinks, drugs and sex prominent. Yet Marcus is a loveable character
Compared with That Reminds Me, his 2019 verse-prose debut that won the Desmond Elliott Prize, and Losing the Plot, a poetic telling of his mother’s migration from Ghana to Britain, stylistically Borderline Fiction is Owusu’s most conventional novel yet — though that doesn’t mean it’s actually conventional. In alternating chapters we follow Marcus, our first-person narrator, aged 19 and aged 25. At 19 he is working in a north London gym when he meets Adwoa, with whom he becomes besotted. At 25 he is an English literature student in Bolton when he meets San and again falls in love.
In both narrative strands, Owusu chops and changes between hefty blocks of stream-of-consciousness prose and fast-paced dialogue presented without speech marks. Throughout, the language is peppered with London slang: “Adwoa looked good. Her hair was Dutch braided, two of them, actually, so she looked even more innocent, but drop to the jeans now and then turn it around and the back was a mad ting.”
Much of the novel is harsh and frenetic, with drinks, drugs and sex prominent. Yet Marcus is a loveable character. Owusu’s narration brings out in him a naivety, such as when he thinks the sound of feet coming off the floor of a club is “like worn-out Velcro on them primary school shoes”.
But Marcus is troubled. Still negotiating the trauma of a childhood spent first in care and later with an alcoholic father, he drinks heavily and self-medicates with cocaine and cocktails of prescription pills. His intense periods of infatuation with his girlfriends are matched with equally extreme bouts of psychosis, with build-ups and comedowns that Owusu details rhythmically: “Those were the best sleeps I had, when my body raged against the dying diazepam and Xanax and lit up my central nervous system to slow time or heat me up or make me faint or dry my mouth or make me freeze, moisten my palms, make me dizzy, make me doubt, make me cry, make me split . . . ” Such passages are horrible — yet thrilling to read.
Knowing Marcus was there aged 19, it is painful to see him still trapped in this spiral six years later. The choppiness of the alternating chapters, combined with the frenzy of much of the action — and the sheer bewilderment, at times, over exactly what is going on — makes Borderline Fiction a chaotic read, matching the discord of its contents. The novel’s title suggests borderline personality disorder (BPD), with which Owusu has been diagnosed. While wider societal understanding of mental illness grows, conditions such as BPD remain misunderstood. Indeed Marcus, when a friend mentions BPD to him, hasn’t heard of it. Borderline Fiction is an addictive and affecting account of how it can spin a person out of control without them even knowing it.
Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu Canongate £18.99, 304 pages
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