Magnus Rena
This Rotation of Buttocks
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The Lodgers, Holly Pester, Granta, 2024, 224 pages, £14.99.
‘I’m sorry, but this rotation of buttocks and welcomes is what you are now economically part of. Get used to it.’
It will come as no surprise that The Lodgers is about lodging – which is to say, living somewhere that isn’t really yours. To lodge is to get by without agency over your space, a space that is owned, decorated, furnished and defined by someone else. The novel – Pester’s first – addresses this uneasy existence: how weird, how unsettling it is to live somewhere that’s barely yours. In doing so, it addresses the madness of the entire UK rental system, which for the last four decades – since Thatcher’s right-to-buy bonanza backfired – has seen the erosion of tenants’ rights and, along with it, the ability to live with any financial, domestic or psychological stability.
The Lodgers is short, brilliantly written and brilliantly unhinged. Two narratives rattle through it. In the first, the narrator has just moved into a bleak shared flat in an Essex town: ‘a small, uninteresting place that loved cars parking without offering much of a reason to drive there.’ The narrator does have a reason. She wants to return to Moffa, her estranged mother, who lives just across the road. Memories of their house are recalled in snatches, a place that was scruffy enough to garner complaints from some neighbours (‘You live like PIGS! This child is neglected’) and pint-raising respect from others (‘O I remember her parties. Legendary nights’). She would rent out her spare rooms if people needed to stay, but charged only ‘enough for rent and wine. Breadsticks and electricity. Dangly earrings and cat food…’ The bare essentials.
Moffa is the punk heroine of the novel. She represents everything the rental market does not: anti-establishment power structures, hospitality, loyalty, fun. And yet we never really meet her. Instead, her absence – her withdrawal – drives the book. It sets us on an almost equal footing with the narrator; we share her sense of abandonment when it becomes clear how much she has lost touch with Moffa, let alone reality. That narrative withdrawal is a clever way of keeping us on side with a narrator that might otherwise be too adrift and neurotic to sympathise with.
Her new flat – as depressing as it is relatable – plays a similar role. It’s a prime example of what has become a tragic architectural style in its own right: the buy-to-let aesthetic of slapdash renovations, laminate flooring and cheap furniture. The living room is forged out of an ‘absurdly awkward corner shape, its most extreme point was above a chugging boiler to the right of the sink. All the sides and optimism of the flat met there to disappear.’ She shares it with Kav, not so much a flatmate as a tedious, ghostlike presence, never seen, only sensed. She imagines him as ‘a creature, specifically a bulbous bin bag with goat legs, that would emerge… and clop about, opening and closing the fridge, grunting, roaming, occupying a liminality…’ This is the kind of feverish, dismal energy that charges the book. It never descends into full-blown nightmarishness but there is always the sense of things fraying, of psychic and infrastructural instability, of something rotten in the state of the rental market. It’s worth stressing that she doesn’t live with Kav out of choice. Flat-sharing with strangers is the only answer to the grim economic equation of friendlessness plus high rents. Of course, it can tun out wonderfully. The problem is that it’s the only option. In 2022, according to the Women’s Budget Group, there was not a single place in the UK where a woman on an average income could afford to buy or rent on her own.
What Pester does so well is to convey this reality – that the narrator is at odds with her surroundings – while sustaining a sense of humour and the suggestion that goodness, happiness and homeliness aren’t entirely remote. Moments of intimacy arise – ‘memories of people passing me a glass of water at night, sensory fragments of a soft arm in the moonlight and another chest breathing’ – and though they are only remembered, never experienced live, they are enough to offset the bleakness, or at least complicate it: to know that this isn’t the only world the narrator has known. These reflective passages are disarmingly tender and the prose is always delicate and calm. That is another of Pester’s skills: to write lucidly even when the narrator herself is losing the plot.
The second narrative comes in alternating chapters. It’s told by the same narrator but directed at a ‘you’, a student who has just started lodging in a small suburban house with a single mum and her young daughter. The deal is she gets the spare room to sleep in but by breakfast time she’s got to be out (her bedroom becomes the mum’s makeshift beauty salon).She tries to get along with her live-in landlord but hardly a day goes by where she doesn’t put her foot in it or misread the strange, pseudo-familial social contract that her lodging involves. A birthday party for one of the daughter’s schoolfriends culminates, after a string of mum-tutting faux pas, with the lodger beneath a mound of sugar-rushing tweenies pummeling her in some spontaneous sacrificial game that reads like a PG spin-off of The Secret History.
All of these scenes are relayed as if the narrator once lived them, the ‘you’ as much another person as it is her past self. It’s as if she is projecting herself into that alternate life, inhabiting it. And it’s with this inhabitation that things get interesting: the idea that one character might lodge in another’s head, that one person might inhabit another’s mind, that a writer might inhabit the reader’s mind, and so on and so on in a whirlpool of semi-schizophrenic inhabitation that perhaps stretches, perhaps not, to the phrase, living rent-free in my head. Such Russian doll meta-lodgery is effective because, firstly, it’s subtle. Each mode of interiority assembles quietly and then dawns on you. It’s also effective because it involves us. ‘The feeling of multiple intrusions coming through and by way of me… have you felt it?’ Well, have we felt it? Chances are: yes. We have skin in the game here. Pester is aware that the majority of her readers are renters, that the conditions she describes are conditions they have lived in. But the significance of The Lodgers is that it does more than describe renters’ experiences, it gives voice to them. It captures the strange, unpleasant atmosphere of it all.
I say this because the housing crisis, like all crises, is often discussed in terms of its basic facts: high rent costs, poor living conditions, increased evictions, the disempowerment of tenants, a shortage of affordable and council housing. Grappling with these facts in literal, economic and practical terms is important. But what is striking about The Lodgers is that it captures how the housing crisis might feel. It strikes a tone – that ‘eerie psychic state created by perpetual precarious housing’, as Pester puts it in an interview – that might struggle to be captured beyond the narrative freedoms of fiction.
Frustratingly, this state of mind is chronically understudied. According to Dr Kim McKee, a university lecturer in Social Policy and Housing, the psychological implications of the housing crisis represent a major ‘research gap’. That would chime with the interviewees for Vicky Spratt’s Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain’s Housing Emergency. On page after page comes the same refrain of disempowerment and hopelessness. ‘I just keep wondering,’ one tenant says, ‘is anyone listening?’ The more people feel ignored and voiceless, the more necessary it is that we have novels like Pester’s. They are the missing link in how we think about and discuss the housing crisis.
That we should turn to fiction and storytelling at times like this is natural. It is even more natural when the matter at hand is as sacred and fundamental as the idea of ‘home’. Spratt says in the introduction to Tenants that the book ‘began as an investigation into Britain’s precarious rented sector,’ but that it became, quite simply, ‘about what it means to have a safe and stable home in an unstable world’. When we talk about the housing crisis, we’re really talking about something more evocative and stirring than that tired and bureaucratic word, ‘housing’.
Homebase tapped into this distinction a long time ago. Heidegger did too, a little while before. He differentiated between shelter and dwelling, the latter defined as an ‘existential foothold,’ a place with character, somewhere that offers a degree of spiritual sustenance beyond the basic conditions needed for survival. Dwelling takes into account how a place makes us feel: the inexpressible quality of a room, its atmosphere, the combination of light, material, texture and temperature that contributes towards a sense of atmosphere. If the space you live in is beholden to a landlord – those walls can’t be painted, that plastic table has to stay, that stain won’t be removed and neither will this mattress which was someone else’s a few months ago and might well be someone else’s before the year’s out – then that space is not really yours, and with every day that you spend in it a sense of alienation is cemented.
As much as these ideas – how environments affect our psychic wellbeing– are not new, they are yet to make a useful impact on the discourse surrounding the housing crisis. Advance praise for Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, included the following description from Owen Jones: a ‘compelling and damning exploration of the abuse of one of our basic human rights: shelter.’ Owen Jones is not wrong. Nobody should be denied shelter. And perhaps it wouldn’t have landed with the same force if he’d said, ‘… one of our basic human rights: dwelling.’ But the problem is: what constitutes shelter? A roof over your head? A warm, well-insulated interior free from damp and mould, from violence and disturbance? Is that it? It is unfortunate that anything more luxurious should be thought of as, well, a luxury. Spratt again: ‘The freedom to set up a home as a space of psychological and economic stability, to live without fear, to exist without great difficulty, has become a privilege when it ought to be a right.’
The irony is that this entire book, The Lodgers, was written – and will be read – in a crisis which threatens those very acts. ‘Reading requires one to be still,’ the narrator points out. ‘So does writing.’ To do either, let alone go about your daily habits, is to contend with a system which is operating in direct hostility to you. And that is exhausting. All of this is exhausting. ‘If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house,’ muses Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, ‘I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house shelters the daydreamer, the house shelters one to dream in peace.’ If only, Gaston. If only. But you are right. And perhaps we will get there. ‘Perhaps,’ sighs Pester’s narrator, ‘I was tired after all. Perhaps I just needed to remember what a house felt like.’
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Magnus Rena works at John Sandoe Books in London and writes in his spare time.
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