Books like Swimming Home

I’m really at a loss to understand why this novella shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 did not win it. This is a perfect book. The prose is magnificent and a tour de force by an author with an exquisite handling particularly of the mental state in human beings.The setting is July 1994, in a villa up in the hills from Nice in the Alpes-Maritime, one of my favourite places in southern France. A famous poet, Jozef Jacobs, known as Joe, and his wife Isabel, a former war correspondent, are on holiday with their teenage daughter Nina. Other household guests are Laura and Mitchell, who own a shop in Euston, London. Isabel has known Laura for many years but they are certainly not close friends, if anything they are used to one another, and are comfortable together. A mix-up in the letting of the villa sees the arrival of Kitty Finch, who is friendly with the Austrian caretaker Jurgen. He was rather taken with Kitty and called her Kitty Ket whilst thinking of any conceivable manoeuvre to get closer to her in more ways than one. Isabel, decides that the villa is more than large enough for them and Kitty is invited to stay by her. The reason for this is apparent later on. Pubescent Nina has become interested in Claude, a friend of Jurgen, who owns the only café in the village and looks like Mick Jagger.Not a very exciting story you may think but think again. Slowly, the problems in Joe’s and Isabel’s marriage and its fragility become apparent, the worries that Nina has, the eighty year old retired Doctor Madeleine Sheridan who views from the balcony next door the development of the family’s encounter with Kitty and who knows the latter’s extraordinary background, and Mitchell and Laura.Talk about bated breath with every single page I read, this book sizzled with secrets, sensuality, depression, depravity, deception, fear, insecurity and I cannot list all the other factors that came into the equation. Every single comment, be it regarding an insect or whatever, is enhanced. The descriptions are vivid. What to any individual would appear as trivia become of vital importance. Every utterance is an impact on life.The theme centres around water and especially the swimming pool and the fact that Kitty had written a poem that she wished Joe to read. Kitty is a botanist and she is following a specific agenda in life. It was rather disturbing to find out what it was.The poem of Sir Walter Scott springs to mind:“Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive"…The intensity of the writing and the attention to detail, never mind the style, are absolutely breathtaking.The novella surges relentlessly towards its rather unexpected conclusion. The ending was not at all what I had envisaged.Spectacular – that’s the only word I can possibly use.