I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson review – a unique take on sibling torment

“I’ll crash the car. // He didn’t shout, which is how I knew he meant it …” The “he” in I Will Crash is never named. He remains an enigma, though we come to know him intimately, or at least we think we do. The narrator’s name is Rosa; “he” is her older brother, who has just died in a car crash. The shock is so destabilising that Rosa finds herself unable to tell her boyfriend, John, what has happened until the following morning. But at the same time, the news is not unexpected. For Rosa, the moment of being told is “as though I am being reminded of a memory, it rises / familiar, settling over me as if it has before”.

Rosa has not seen her brother for six years. Yet that also is not quite true. In the opening pages of the novel, we learn that he turned up on her doorstep less than a month before – “it was a peace offering,” Rosa admits, “I knew that” – but instead of inviting him inside she shut the door in his face. She runs through alternative scenarios with painful clarity, imagining how things might have unfolded if she had acted differently. “But the real pieces / him at the door / saying no / then gone / those are set bones / I can do nothing with them other than admit that they are there.” The actuality of her brother’s death is a fact she must face.

Rosa’s feelings about that death are violently conflicted. She is horrified by the instantaneousness of her brother’s extinction, his irrevocable descent into the past. At the same time, she finds it difficult to mourn his loss. The history between Rosa and her brother is difficult, and, in spite of the death of one of them, still unfolding.

In a childhood defined by the failure of her parents’ marriage, Rosa felt victimised by a brother she came increasingly to fear. What made matters worse was that no one else seemed to notice she was being bullied. “It wasn’t just the being hurt that I feared,” she recalls, “it was the endlessness of it, so much of the evening left … and somehow it was destined to be my fault.”

When as an adult she tries to explain how she was made to feel, the abuses perpetrated by her brother sound petty and inconsequential, the usual kind of sibling rivalry. Both parents, though long separated, seem united in dismissing Rosa’s grievances as childish, insisting that both siblings were equally to blame. The fate of Rosa’s best friend, Alice, in particular, is a subject they are reluctant to discuss in any detail.

The gaslighting Rosa is subjected to ultimately proves as painful as her brother’s abuses. As with any deeply rooted family trauma, it is difficult for those who were not there to fully appreciate the damage that has been done. Neither can we as readers ever be certain. When Rosa finally meets Julia, her brother’s girlfriend, she is offered a glimpse of her tormentor that differs wildly from the person she remembers. As the older sibling with the more firmly rooted memories, Rosa’s brother is haunted by their mother’s absence in a way that Rosa – always closer to their father – is not. While Rosa’s account of her brother’s vindictiveness suggests genuine malice, Julia seems in no doubt that the man she loved was so severely affected by his broken childhood that his death might actually have been suicide. The distance between Rosa and her brother cannot be closed, because their versions of the same events are irreconcilable. How well can we ever know anyone? Where the full facts are in doubt, perception becomes as important as the truth itself.

In an interview following the publication of her debut novel Little Scratch, Watson talked about the vitality and elusiveness of the present tense, and the difficulties of translating moments in time through the written word. In that first book she treated the printed page almost as a painter might use a canvas, with language employed like colour, as a concrete entity: words scatter and then regroup like shoals of fish; characters appear for a moment and then are gone.

This second novel makes use of similarly experimental techniques, though Watson has widened her scope to encompass the past. Through word-patterning, font-switching, broken lines and poetic cadences, she integrates the raw strangeness of the present moment with the dagger-bright flash of memories that will not be eradicated. Once again, her free-form approach, a dense intermingling of different registers of language, of spoken words and internalised thoughts, allows the reader a uniquely personal experience of the novel’s spaces.

Speaking about a paper he is preparing on Gertrude Stein, John reflects on how “after she died, her partner told an interviewer that Gertrude hated her own past, barely liked to talk about it … I think it was easier then, to do that. Makes me think of Bob Dylan, James Baldwin, that thing of being able to fuck off somewhere, the possibility of remaking yourself and leaving no prints.” For Rosa, grieving itself is an act of compromise. The unspoken duality of Watson’s narrative underlines how such an escape from one’s past, though deeply desired, is rarely clean; how families can come to be defined by the uneasy relationship between belonging and entrapment.

• I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.