As a British reader, I am admittedly fussy when it comes to mysteries that take place on labyrinthine country estates. “The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus,” Emma Knight’s debut novel set in Scotland, initially had my trope and tartan radar blinking. Fearing another entry into the buzzy “cozy fiction” genre, I instead found a winsome tale of one young woman’s coming-of-age.
Penelope “Pen” Winters — a bookish stick-in-the-mud with the “skittish flinch of a black house cat” — is a Canadian first-year student at the University of Edinburgh, where she has matriculated with her childhood friend, Alice. She’s scarred by her parents’ divorce and desperate to learn more about the youth her father spent in Britain, so, finally independent at college, she contacts an old friend of his, the famous novelist Lord Elliot Lennox, who also happens to live in Scotland. “I have pieced together some clues over the years, and they all lead to you,” she writes, believing Lennox has some connection to her parents’ split. Lennox, suspiciously eager to help, invites Pen to his Saltburn-esque castle.
It is an undeniably delicious premise: A foreign student nervously pads up the parquet stairs of a Scottish country pile, looking for a family secret. A gorgeous son, Sasha Lennox, appears, and their hands brush as he helps Pen carry her bags. A zany cast of Lennoxes pops out of wood-paneled rooms. Pen soon realizes she is “a bit in love with all of them.”
There’s a disastrous hunting trip, oil portraits of ancestors, a “persona non grata” hidden relative (thankfully, the “Bertha in the attic” allusion ends there). Just as I was about to roll my eyes at what could have been a predictable story within a tired pastiche of upper-crust life, I softened. The concept of a stranger lurking among a complicated aristocratic clan, “with all their tempests and teapots,” is far from new, but it’s such fun here. And the book is filled with literary references. There are nods to “Brideshead Revisited,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Macbeth” and more. Jilly Cooper gets a mention, naturally.
Though the story is animated by a mystery, the true heart of the novel is Pen’s jolt into adulthood. Back in Edinburgh, Pen’s parents’ past temporarily takes a back seat. She struggles to keep the fickle, brooding Sasha off her mind while a series of irresistible campus dramas — including a friend’s affair with a married tutor — take over her life and push her closest relationships to their limits. Later in the book, Pen takes an uncharacteristically gutsy risk, and her “restrictive code of conduct” begins to yield. She eventually vows “to free herself from the useless burden of other people’s expectations.”
Knight writes with humor and generosity as we follow Pen’s frequently painful metamorphosis into womanhood. Her kind, comic eye sneaks into the novel in subtle, endearing ways, like when Pen is harassed on a train by a man whose “biceps resembled baking potatoes.” Her densely packed prose, however, tends to describe to the point of claustrophobia. I didn’t always need to know that a lever was “bronze-handled,” a neck “sweat-darkened” or fingers “rubber-gloved”; such superfluous details occasionally felt like road blocks in the addicting plot.
What Pen discovers about her family’s tie to the Lennoxes is no stunning twist, and it manifests without much melodrama. Instead of staggering from the reveal, we are left pondering what a changed Pen might do with her own legacy. “The only way is to make peace with yourself,” she realizes at last.
Amid the tweed, college escapades and British literary winks, Knight has crafted a tantalizing yet quietly touching debut about inheritance, emerging sexuality and what it truly means to come into one’s own.
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