Kingfisher

217 pages · Kindle Edition · 2025 · Saraband

What he calls love

Rozie Kelly's Kingfisher begins with a gay man on a bench by a river, watching ducks and deciding he wants to sleep with a woman.

He is thirty-five, a writing fellow at a university, living with Michael, his long-term partner, in a relationship that has opened itself without learning how to speak. The woman is seventeen years older, famous, wealthy and known throughout the novel only as "the poet". Desire arrives first as appetite, then turns into attention and pursuit.

Age-gap affair, queer domesticity and terminal illness all sit on the surface of Kingfisher. The deeper pressure is agency: who acts, who is acted upon and who gains control once private life is turned into material. The narrator's attention looks like devotion, but its final form is possession. He does not merely love the poet. He writes her.

He watches the poet before he knows her, classifies her before he understands her and turns her into scent, gesture and public meaning. The name "the poet" already reduces her to function. The later name, Kingfisher, completes the act.

Kelly's narrator is morally unsafe. He is self-aware enough to be dangerous and wounded enough to believe himself innocent. His first attraction contains admiration and violence. He wants her intelligence and imagines subduing it. What he calls love is not clean as it deepens. It adds envy, then proximity to death.

Hetty, his abusive mother, leaves punishment and a body trained into obedience. His father: tenderness, falconry and ashes. The narrator returns to both when desire confuses him. The family history gives his behaviour an origin, not an alibi.

The cancer diagnosis changes the affair without cleaning it. Desire moves into service. He learns a body under medical pressure: what it will still accept, when appetite goes, how treatment lands. The book's deepest intimacy arrives through labour, not feeling.

That care gives the narrator access. Access gives him authority. She remains wilful inside illness, still smoking, still refusing to become a patient. The use runs both ways. His old friend Jessica asks who is using whom. She already knows. She is asking whether he does.

Secrecy keeps the poet outside the mint-scented order Michael represents. The narrator hides her. Naming the relationship would drag it into ordinary life: rent, routine, jealousy.

Kelly makes the conventional choice. The four-person entanglement is where the real instability lives: unresolved rules and competing desires inside a morality that will not settle. The illness plot that replaces it is tidier, a straight line toward inheritance. It resolves the narrator's status by handing him a role. The stronger novel would have kept him without one. The retreat shows in the pace. The narrator's hospital visits acquire the rhythm of routine. A chair beside the bed, a quiz prepared in advance, an ice lolly brought as proof of attention. The details are exact, but the motion has slowed. Control is not momentum.

The reduction is the narrator's, and Kelly lets it run. By the close the poet is poet, patient, bird and book. Each name does less for her and more for him. He cannot meet a person without converting them into use. The novel sees that fault in him. It does not step outside him to register the cost from her side. That habit is Kelly's design. Whether the book shares the habit or only observes it is the question she leaves open. The danger remains.

The ending returns the cost. The poet calls before dawn. He takes her outside into the cold, to the woods and water, and she dies in his arms. It settles the account in his hands. Her funeral happens without him. The book remains. The market receives it. He becomes the person through whom she is publicly known.

The poet's death leaves the narrator with grief, material and authority. Kelly's debut is strongest when it refuses to make that inheritance clean. The later novel grows too dutiful to the illness plot it has chosen, and the discomfort that made the opening urgent cannot carry the weight of that choice alone. Three stars.