History Keeps Me Awake at Night tells the story of Margit, a woman who has it all and wants none of it. Christy Edwall’s first novel has echoes of other recent debuts about well-educated, miserable young women – see Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms (2021) or Daisy Lafarge’s Paul (2021) – but it differs vastly in the way its protagonist handles this misery. It is set during that period after university when heavily indebted young people quickly discover that education does not necessarily translate into opportunity.
For Margit, “crimes capture the imagination”. In History she distracts herself from, and diminishes, her own malaise via an increasing obsession with the abduction of forty-three students in Iguala, Mexico, in 2014. The leads and patterns she follows are as attached to the real world as the fancy-dress parties and private members’ club events she attends in London. This doesn’t stop her from experiencing swells of excitement every time she notices something new and different about the murders: “The attacks, when connected, made up a perforated outline, a shadow map of the city”.
The novel alternates between Margit’s internal and external lives: her singular obsession with the missing students that leads her down streets on Google Maps – and into the actual home of a fortune-teller (wielding a University of Southampton mug) – and her life as a young South African woman living in a small flat in London with her uninteresting husband, Nat, a barrister.
In contrast to the hare-brained and wholly fanciful investigations into the Mexico murders, Edwall’s descriptions of Margit’s life in London are starkly real, recognizable; each short chapter is a damning, sometimes funny snapshot of millennial middle-class life in the capital. Nobody is spared in this world of constant posturing and absurd conversation. Margit’s friend Joanna, who has just broken up with her boyfriend, complains that she should have known he wasn’t right for her when he said his favourite novels were The Great Gatsby and Bel-Ami. The portraits of Margit’s friends may be unbecoming – “Sasha took a book from her Daunt bag. Who reads Anna Akhmatova at a party?” – but they look positively flattering compared to those of Nat, who is appalling and ridiculous, despite, or perhaps because of, his good manners. He only appears in History to undermine or berate Margit as she becomes increasingly obsessed with the missing students. When he says to Margit, “What’s wrong? You look awful”, she observes: “But he didn’t want to know, he just wanted to be a cowboy”.
Towards the start of the novel Edwall reveals a glimpse of Margit’s backstory, which includes an absent and well-to-do father, who is a banker. Her obsession with missing people and discomfort with the English middle class is thus thrown into relief, but the author is subtle enough to leave things there. Not until much later in the novel do we return to Margit’s past, when Nat asks of her behaviour: “Is this supposed to compensate for some childhood trauma?”. Margit brushes him off.
Christy Edwall’s writing is littered with references to historical figures, criminals and authors (the spirit of Roberto Bolaño looms large). This accretion can be hard to follow, but the author always pulls back just in time. Margit’s thoughts may wander haphazardly, but they will suddenly land with a brisk realization: “One life is not enough. I need several, packed together, to make up the sum”. Each chapter opens with a slew of seemingly unconnected musings and observations, which then cohere towards that chapter’s end in surprising and satisfying ways. History Keeps Me Awake at Night may be yet another novel about a sad young woman finding her feet in London after university, but Margit is a highly original and memorable protagonist.
Alex Howlett is the co-author of Wander Women: Tales of transgression in a bordered world, 2022. She is a producer with Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit
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