Sarah Hudson is an angsty, workaholic Mancunian, still single in her early 40s and about to kiss goodbye to her inner self: a traumatised wee lassie persistently besotted with her childhood English teacher.
Sarah has appetites; she’s a “caner”, an enthusiast for drugs, booze, and bedding rock’n’roll singers. She reckons on a window of sex before the inevitability of post-menopausal invisibility. Deciding on a Scottish safari with her sister Juliette, they go on a motorhome tour of distilleries, more nip than tuck, more win a bag of coke than Winnebago. A road trip then, a novel about sibling love and rivalries.
They stagger up to Ullapool and Cape Wrath, John O’Groats and Aviemore, fuelled by shots of Highland Park, Talisker and The Singelton. Sarah and Juliette expose their vulnerabilities, their worries over an ever-shrinking circle of friends, their Corryvreckan spiral of decline in self-esteem. A voluptuous melancholy that has Sarah determined “she would try to let people into her broken little house of horrors”. In tone, Slags is an earthy blend of Emma Cline and Ed Atkins with a similar fixation on solipsistic inner interrogations and the palliative use of food in the face of existential despair.
All this delivered in Sarah’s droll confessional, her voice echt, as brightly true and un-phony as that of Holden Caulfield. Unsworth’s story is packed with pithy diagnostics, conspiratorial giggles: hers is an absurdist humour of recognition over modern life’s humiliations. A weird and wacky world obsessed by gut health and generalisation about generations, where “Gen Z-ers will respect your pronouns but not you as a person”.
Unsworth is also hypersensitive to the othering of single women, the endless questioning: “Found anyone yet?” She has too a supremely delicate sympathy to “the eternal book balancing of siblingdom” and its bottomless “layers of subtext”, the She Ain’t Heavy debts and denials.
[ Emma Jane Unsworth on postnatal depressionOpens in new window ]
Life for the sisters is, in Powell and Pressburger’s memorable phrase about postwar Vienna, “hopeless but not serious”. This is a deeply wise and hilarious novel about a pair of clever romantics who “always get a bit lost” and where there’s no such thing as closure.
