JAMES MCKENZIE WATSON Denizen. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith
James McKenzie Watson’s thriller-like debut brings coherence to a life breaking apart.
James McKenzie Watson’s first novel Denizen is partly a thriller and partly a depiction of generational abuse and its consequences, drawing on the author’s upbringing in rural Australia and his experience as a nurse. Set mainly in the fictional town of Colladai and its surrounds, the novel follows Parker Davis, a young boy whose unstable mother blames him for the life she hates. Parker has inherited his own problems, and it is these that Watson works through in the book.
Having successfully escaped Colladai to a Sydney university where he studies classical piano, Parker finds himself drawn back to his home town as his childhood psychoses begin to resurface. As a teenager, Parker managed to wrest control of his demons thanks to his best friend, Nayley, who saw into his ‘core’ on a camping trip and cured him. It is this psychedelic, semi-spiritual healing that he believes will help where medication has failed:
Her eyes touched my core and I gasped as though plunged into ice water. She flipped through my childhood memories like prints in an album … felt the shame’s shape and weight and texture.
Denizen is a difficult book to summarise, in part because Watson has chosen a structure for his novel that often diverges chronologically. The book’s first part takes place in Colladai when Parker is a child and centres around a vicious act of violence in which he is not completely innocent. With occasional jumps to his present life as a father, the novel’s second part addresses his return to his hometown and the camping trip upon which he has staked his hopes. As the book develops, its structure becomes progressively more fragmented – presumably to depict Parker’s faltering grasp of reality – until the final chapters are told in brief blasts of text.
come here parker what are you gut you while you slept you’ll have a child and when you do born and see yourself doing come here parker and feel terrified because their eyes when they’re come here parker what are you doing come here what
Watson plays with modernist techniques that have, in the century separating their arrival, found a home in many writers’ toolboxes: stream-of-consciousness segments; an unreliable narrator; the aforementioned non-linear structure. Despite these the book is a thriller at its core, these tactics employed to heighten the tension that builds as Parker is revealed as less functional than the stability of his new life would suggest.
Watson’s prose is quick when it needs to be and he rides the mounting tension with care. He shows a good eye for the detail of rural Australia 20-odd years ago, particularly in the first section, with references to touchstones of Australian pop culture and precise descriptions of awful family dinners. However, he has a tendency to summarise – or at least imply – key points at the end of each section. This is admittedly subjective, but I began to wonder if Watson did not sufficiently trust his reader to let himself leave certain things unsaid. Particularly as the book breaks apart towards its end, achieving some impressive impressionistic effects, Watson is careful to keep everything clear. I found myself thinking of American Psycho, which creates similar narrative confusion yet does not fully reveal its hand, forcing the reader to inhabit a similar condition to its tormented narrator. When Parker’s world is infested with ghosts, with his mother and her ‘infinite legs’, with an infant son who at times he is sure is his own spitting image, why not allow for some degree of narrative ambiguity?
Watson does use Parker’s unreliability for dramatic purposes, although these misunderstandings are clarified and a logical trajectory of events emerges. This is why the book wears its less traditional narrative techniques as clothes rather than as its own skin – Watson employs them in service of plot rather than for readers to live the torturous inner life of his protagonist. That said, many readers will find this a more satisfying approach.
Despite much of Denizen taking place inside Parker’s head, it is sometimes difficult to feel we know him as a person. This may be a result of such focus on his mental health: there’s little room for the rest of his character. His mother is drawn vividly as a perpetrator of abuse – a particularly unnerving trait is her habit of entering Parker’s room, asking why he called her, and using his confusion as an excuse to attack him. Similarly, Watson’s portrayal of an uneasy friendship between Parker and the manipulative Ruben is handled with delicacy, evoking an uncertainty common to victims of abuse, both knowing they are being manipulated and still needing their abuser’s approval. This is where Watson succeeds admirably, weaving together different strands of suffering and trauma, showing how its childhood seeds blossom into violence while remaining steadfastly rooted in the past.
James McKenzie Watson Denizen Penguin Viking 2022 PB 352pp$32.99
James McKenzie Watson will be appearing at the 2023 Sydney Writers’ Festival. You can see him ‘In Conversation’ on 24 May at Penrith and on the panel ‘Life in the Landscape’ at Carriageworks on 25 May.
Ben Ford Smith is an Adelaide-based writer and the co-author of Drugs, Guns & Lies (2020, Allen & Unwin). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Flinders University, South Australia.
You can buy Denizen from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.
You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.
If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.
