I found Rozie Kelly’s Kingfisher to be an immensely good piece. The way she writes left a real affect on me, to the point that I found myself articulating my own thoughts in the same way that the narrator describes his. It’s a strange phenomenon to experience whilst reading – a similar thing happened to me after reading Ocean Voung’s ‘On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous’. I suppose both authors must have very distinct voices.
With Kelly’s writing, the first aspect that I would like to draw our attention to is how she describes characters, not merely by their speech and appearance, but the physical effect they have made on the world. This is firstly clear on page 14, when our narrator speaks of Micheal:
“When I try to imagine us growing old together, I cannot picture his face, but I can smell mint and feel him kiss the back of my hand.”
Although we have been told the colour of Micheal’s hair and eyes, it is this depiction, this sensory, lingering smell of his aftershave which makes him real. His presence survives beyond the visual, it crawls along the room and remains when he leaves for the day.
This language of presence is littered throughout, also notably in a passage towards the end of the novel.
“I’d left in a panic and forgotten our old kitchen table, with the coffee rings from my father.” p 176.
The image of absence, of the hot moisture of the coffee forever staining the study wooden table is very powerful. The stains are just beyond our reach, physical and visible yet not tangible. It’s proof of the existence of our narrator’s father within the mundane, everyday, sipping coffee sort of world. It is proof of his existence beyond the hero-like characteristics we so often assign to our lost loved ones. Something about these lines, about how Kelly proves the presence and existence of these characters by their lingering smells and traces of coffee-stains is a true testament to her writing.
My favourite section of the book is just before the halfway point. This is when our narrator’s and The Poet’s connection is blooming and they engage in ordinary activities together. In Chapter 17, the two of them wake up beside each other; they gather their possessions and head out together to have a picnic. It seems to be a perfect day and our narrator describes it as such. As often within the novel, the descriptions of his day are littered with certain introspective thoughts. There is a certain one of these introspective thoughts which really hit me when I read it.
After they have packed up their picnic they walk along to a nearby graveyard and our narrator notes: “It reminded me of the Thomas Hardy tree at St Pancras Old Church and for a moment I wanted to weep over how many skeletons there were underneath our feet.” (p 75). After describing the churchyard they walk in and the feeling of the muggy sun, our narrator seems incapable of separating his sadness from his surroundings. I really enjoyed the sudden humanity that Rozie Kelly leaks into this sentence. It is almost like an afterthought, it is the last phrase of the paragraph in a solo reference to our narrator’s sadness and the fragility of it seeping out from him.
Finally, I want to talk about the section of the book just after our narrator’s mother has died. This comes only about twenty pages after the previous section we have just spoken about. After Hetty has died, Micheal returns home with the intention of leaving our narrator. It seems however, that when he returns, our narrator is drunk on rum.
“Micheal said he would stay that night because I was clearly too drunk, then he would pack his bags and leave tomorrow, but I didn’t really understand what he meant because I was a pirate standing on the deck of my ship and the stormy seas were throwing me about…” p 98.
Our narrator is so very detached from Micheal and his mother’s death. In his drinking, he has found escapism in not just a numbing of emotions, but by almost transporting himself to inhabit a different realm entirely. It is rather humorous that in his mind he has made the caricaturistic relation of drinking rum to meaning that he is now a pirate. However, beyond this humor, it is deeply sad. It is a way to not live with the truth, to revert back to childish imaginations. It is these same childish imaginations that he would have experienced as a child when his mother was alive, but now she is gone and he is just a grown man, drunk and playing pirate. I think the way that Kelly writes about grief and detachment in this fleeting passage is remarkable and unique to her style of prose.
Overall, Kingfisher was very enjoyable. It has a very captivating story and even more so, is written with such care and beauty. From the little sections where Kelly speaks of “students gathered on the grass, laughing, performing youth to one another” (p 10) to how she describes the fluidity of pouring words onto a typewriter as “like bleeding from a main artery” (p 143). I think we have found a gem in Rozie Kelly and I look forward to seeing what is next in her writing career.
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