Asylum Road is a wickedly skilful thriller about a toxic romance
“Sometimes it felt like the murders kept us together.” As opening lines go, you can’t do much better than Asylum Road. The realisation, a few sentences later, that it is not in fact a Bonnie-and-Clyde style crime spree preserving narrator Anja’s fragmenting relationship with her boyfriend Luke, but a shared addiction to true crime podcasts, comes not as an anticlimax, but as a further wave of pleasure – at the sheer audacity of such merciless, reader-skewering writing.
It is the second novel from 32-year-old Olivia Sudjic, whose 2017 debut Sympathy was crowned “the first great Instagram Novel” by The New Republic. That book – a feverish, surreal account of a young graduate’s social-media-driven obsession with an older woman – shares with Asylum Road a rootless young protagonist with a painful, obscured family history and a bone-dry narrative voice (Anja’s monthly phone calls to her parents are “as unremarkable as menstruation,” she tells us early on.) But the resemblance ends there. The world has moved on since 2017 and so have Sudjic’s themes: Asylum Road is not about technology, but Brexit and a toxic romantic relationship.
Written in the wake of the referendum, it approaches European politics through the lens of Sudjic’s own family history – she is British but her paternal grandparents, to whom the novel is dedicated, emigrated from the former Yugoslavia after the Second World War. She gives Anja what feels like a counterfactual version of her own story: born in Sarajevo in the build up to the Bosnian War, she is sent to Glasgow as a child refugee after the city comes under siege (approximately 14,000 people died, including more than 1,500 children). In the novel, the psychological aftermath of the Brexit vote is beginning to corrode Anja’s painstakingly cultivated, Cambridge-educated sense of assimilation. “They’re othering you” her friend Christopher observes, when Luke’s parents give her A Pocket Guide to the Superstitions of the British Isles for Christmas.
While rarely addressing it head on, the novel brims with echoes of its great political preoccupation; images of nationalism, invasion, and parasitism, particularly from the animal kingdom, abound. Luke’s vividly unpleasant parents are Cornish nationalists engaged in unflagging warfare with the moles that dig up their lawn, the bees that colonise their attic, and the second-homers who contest their property boundary.
At times, as the symbolism crashes through the writing with all the subtlety of a Take Back Control banner, the satire feels simplistic: is Brexit really the product of small-minded provincials turning against child refugees? The political implications of the highly dramatic ending are rather brittle, leaving the reader with the vague sense of having consumed a polemic rather than a piece of flexible, compassionate fiction. Still, the growing sense of unease that its political vision generates, of suppressed but violent urges to expel or invade, difficult to pin to specific characters, chills the novel like a fridge.
The most intense and alarming boundary friction resides not in the political, but the romantic landscape. Anja and Luke’s relationship is a portrait of toxic love in crisis, full of beautifully observed power shifts, silent battles, and small betrayals. When Anja moves into Luke’s flat, things begin to stop working: a tap drips, a shelf falls down, the gas ring won’t ignite. It is as though the claustrophobia and resentments of the relationship are seeping into the physical world, leaving the novel teetering on the edge of haunted house horror. At one point, in remembering advice that “if you have to have a difficult conversation, walking or driving works well”, Anja casually notes, “for our relationship in general, sitting face to face across a table induced a hostile charge.”
Asylum Road is also the work of a literary voice maturing. Where Sympathy was wandering, it is taut and propulsive, carefully plotted as a three-part thriller – or three-act tragedy. It is full of witty slices of structural symmetry: the second part is called “Split” for Anja and Luke’s trip to the city of that name in Croatia, to see her parents, but also for their increasingly fraying relationship; and the first line is echoed in the final scene, in which Luke instructs Anja, over the phone, how to kill a mouse. In the end, as it turns out, it is the murders, rather than the slightly simplistic politics, that hold the novel together. Enjoyed on those terms, it is masterful and wicked.
Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic is published by Bloomsbury. To order your copy for ￡12.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books