The Usual Desire To Kill is the debut novel of theatremaker Camilla Barnes. Set in a ramshackle house in the French countryside, the story is told predominantly through the eyes of actress Miranda, following the frustrating and amusing exploits of her parents. Set in their ways, Mum and Dad have filled their home with ancient chest freezers, trinkets of all kinds and even two llamas.
Miranda visits her parents semi-frequently, dealing with garden chores and spoilt waistcoats and spats between her parents that she has long given up on trying to mediate. In between these visits, we get a look back at Mum’s university years through letters to her sister, Kitty. This experimentation with format is enjoyable and intriguing to read. Being introduced Mum’s inner voice humanises her even when, in the present, she seems both emotionally closed-off and irritable.
The book makes for a fascinating musing on how little we really know our parents. There is nuance to every character—for example, things that seem infuriating to Miranda and Charlotte are minor amusements to Miranda’s daughter Alice. Mum’s eccentricities, joked about by her daughters, are sometimes borne of an old pain they cannot even know about. Not everything in the story is wrapped up tidily, which in this case is a testament to the fact that family issues themselves are rarely tidy and never altogether resolved.
Choosing to refer to these two characters so much as ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ rather than using their actual names is an interesting choice on Barnes’ part, as once more it establishes that we never knew our parents before they were our parents. The degree to which personhood can be removed by parenthood is a prevalent theme, particularly in regards to Mum’s character, who has so often felt stripped of the element of choice. There are elements of her past that she still struggles to reclaim even more than fifty years later.
One way in which The Usual Desire To Kill could have gone deeper into these characters is also related to the past. As we know so much about Mum’s youth, it would have been interesting to find out more about Miranda and Charlotte’s childhoods—while they reference what it was like to grow up with their stubborn parents, it is not as in-depth as Mum’s retellings of her university days. Some expansion on this would have gone further to explain the rift between the girls and their parents at times. They seem to harbour more ill-will towards one parent than the other, but imply that both were equally difficult to live with when they were young.
Barnes does excel at balancing the comedic with the tragic, without either becoming too heavy-handed. Her ability to make you feel for a character even if they have spent many pages doing unlikeable things is one not commonly found, and this fictional family are as sympathetic as they are infuriating. You come to enjoy being infuriated to the point where, when Mum or Dad are more subdued, you already miss it.
Words by Casey Langton
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