One summer, William Low sends his four children to his house in the south of France. He’ll join them when he’s finished his business in China. The siblings have different mothers – the older two, Luke and Connor, were born to William’s first wife, and the younger ones, Thea and Violet, are the daughters of his second. The siblings are convinced this week alone is his way of bringing them closer. Although they’re already close, in an unusual way. The middle two, Connor and Thea, are only six months apart in age, “knotted in the middle, too close in age”, an overlapping the siblings can’t quite reconcile. They don’t know it, but they will never see their father again.
The third novel by British writer and musician Kerry Andrew pitches these siblings into an ambiguous apocalyptic event. At the beginning, they’re in various states of distress and preoccupation: 14-year-Violet is considering suicide; 20-year-old Luke is trying not to think about a sexual partner who liked to dominate him; 17-year-old Thea is obsessed with sex; and 17-year-old Connor is thinking about the “long, unpulsing drone” he’d captured on a recording in the backyard. Connor is also thinking about Thea.
Aside from their personal dramas, all seems fine – except for the unexplained noise that only Connor can hear. The children visit the nearby village, host a party with new friends and neighbours, swim in the pool and in the nearby lake. But the novel cleverly lets the reader know what the children cannot perceive.
In sporadic italicised interludes, we learn about odd things: a garden dormouse making a nest of an uncommonly large size; a two-tailed lizard gorging on insects; algae spores populating roof tiles; truffles in the oak forest inflating to “colossal, unnatural sizes in the soil”. These sections imbue the novel with a definite sense of unease and mystery: “Then, a great cull, as there is from time to time, and the Earth renews.”
The sky disappears under thick, rippled, lavender clouds and everything changes. Their mothers and their father send a couple of text messages and then, nothing. The siblings understand that if they want to survive, they’ll need to fend for themselves.
It’s a slow build to the more stirring action of the novel – there’s a lot of time spent developing the characters of the siblings, easing us gently into their holiday routines and the strained dynamics of split families coming together. Once their survival hangs in the balance, the energy between them shifts, and this enriches the story significantly.
Kerry Andrew, winner of four British Composer Awards and shortlisted twice for the BBC National Short Story Award, has a direct writing style punctuated with vivid, poetic description, especially with sound and the natural world: “A lesser horseshoe bat swims through the night air, gathering a moth as delicate as cigarette paper into its mouth.”
We Are Together Because is about “peculiar intimacy”, family, abuse, gender, resilience and loss. The ending leaves plenty of room for interpretation – Andrew is more interested in the emotional fallout of such an event rather than a scientific or rational explanation, reminiscent of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind.
We Are Together Because is also climate fiction, a call for us to heed the environment, to listen more closely, look more deeply. This is a keenly evoked novel for those who like things a little off-kilter.
We Are Together Because by Kerry Andrew (Atlantic Books, $36.99) is out now.
