Review | Katie Kitamura’s cerebral, gripping third novel, easier to admire than love
A Separation explores the space between marriage and divorce, with a plot that could be made to sound like a thriller, as a wife travels to Greece to find her estranged husband
A Separation by Katie Kitamura (Profile)
The premise of A Separation, Katie Kitamura’s third novel, could be made to sound like a literary thriller. I don’t mean the winding, psychological twisters currently in vogue, such as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train. Think the enigmatic “god games” played in John Fowles’ 1965 novel The Magus, only without the baffling plot, dodgy interracial pornography and restless rewrites.
Like The Magus, A Separation begins when a bright, youngish thing swaps England for Greece, and an atmosphere heavy with paranoia, death and a growing sense that reality is not to be trusted. In Kitamura’s case, the main player is an unnamed American woman who has been sent to find her recently vanished husband, Christopher.
If this makes A Separation sound a chilly proposition, then it owes something to our narrator, who proves herself a natural-born observer. In arguably the novel’s finest set piece, she watches as three of the island’s inhabitants act out a kind of love triangle. Unable to understand what is being said, she fills in the gaps to her own satisfaction, although we never entirely discover how correct her suppositions are.