I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson review

A woman is haunted by her abusive relationship with her brother in this experimental novel of family trauma and memory

“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.