The premise of Imogen West-Knights’ debut is rich with emotive potential. Deep Down begins as Billie, a twentysomething Londoner, and her older brother Tom, a “failed actor” living in Paris, face unexpected news. Their father has died suddenly. The “frighteningly unfamiliar territory” of grief opens before them. These estranged siblings decide they need to be together, and so Billie flies to France.
West-Knights deftly shows us that the relationship between the siblings, and with their dad William, is anything but straightforward. In prose with a spareness conveying the numbness of early bereavement, Deep Down shuttles between present and past, as well as between Tom and Billie’s very different but equally vulnerable perspectives. Attention is directed to the complicated tenderness and shared history between them, existing regardless of an intractable awkwardness. This latent closeness is conveyed in fleeting and often powerfully ambivalent images. When Billie stays in Tom’s cramped garret, he recognises that she “sleeps as she always has, on her front, arms pinned behind her and her face squashed up by the pillow like someone being punched”. Woozily wandering between the arrondissements, the siblings dodge tourists and tiptoe around each other’s feelings, awaiting news of funeral plans. The withholding of information is masterfully sustained as we come to understand why they have responded to their father’s death with such profound ambiguity.
