In 2018, Olivia Sudjic spent two months alone in Brussels. Her debut novel, Sympathy, had been published to critical acclaim and she hoped to make progress with a second. Instead, she found herself in the grip of an agonising spiral of anxiety and self-doubt, unable to write, unable almost to think. She later wrote about the experience in a long-form essay, Exposure, a scrupulous examination of the pressures of social media and the personal scrutiny to which she believes female writers are particularly subjected. In that essay Sudjic argues that her periodic episodes of anxiety, while agonising, are necessary to her writing: the writer’s duty, she contends, “is to seek out chaos, or the very thing of which she is most afraid”.
In Asylum Road, she appears to have done exactly that. Anya, a twentysomething PhD student in London, grew up during the brutal siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. The siege, lasting three and a half years, was the longest in modern history. Snipers surrounded the city, picking off targets; buildings were shelled daily. There was little food, water, no electricity or heat. Residents burned furniture to keep warm and foraged for wild plants including dandelion roots. By the time the siege was finally lifted, nearly 14,000 people were dead.
Asylum Road alludes only glancingly to these grim facts. Instead Sudjic takes us inside Anya’s head, to the psychological effects of profound childhood trauma. When Anya remembers, she does so not as a journalist or historian but as a survivor, in elliptical fragments that expose only the edges of a chasm of memories too raw and terrifying ever to revisit. The extent of her psychological damage surfaces in deep, barely explained terrors: tunnels, for example, and soft fruit, whose multiplicity of textures – “seed, liquid, flesh, skin” – hint unsettlingly at death and putrefaction.
Mostly, though, Anya is endeavouring not to remember. At the start of the novel, in a hotel in France, she finds a survival guide on the bedside table, its subjects arranged alphabetically. She opens it at random, to “Q” for “Quicksand”: “I knew that already. Lie very still and flat. On no account struggle or try to pull yourself out.”
Living in her boyfriend’s flat, working – or not working – on her PhD, failing to take her driving test, Anya is lying very still. Luke, seemingly reliable with an ethically admirable career in biodiversity, is also emotionally erratic, prone to disappearing acts and abruptly changing moods, so that at times with him Anya finds herself “having crossed an obscure boundary into a strange place, a territory which only minutes ago had not been there”. All the same, when Luke proposes, she accepts. She has a desperate yearning for happy-ever-after, which she thinks of as a physical place, “a place where I could unpack, lie down and never have to move again, and the future became an ending”.
Anya manages to cling to her stillness – just – as they visit Luke’s ghastly parents in Cornwall, but when they fly to Split so that Luke can finally meet her “distended” family, Anya leaves her passport and her PhD notebook on the plane. It is a loss not only of the documents that define her adult self but of the rigid defences that have maintained it. As they travel from Croatia to Montenegro and on to Sarajevo where Anya’s mother, gripped by trauma-induced dementia, is convinced the siege is still going on, Anya’s past thrusts itself into her present, destroying any pretence that she can keep it under control.
In taut, jittery prose, Sudjic maps Anya’s disintegration. For readers of Exposure, her symptoms are familiar and frightening: the disembodiment, the nausea, “the unrelenting sensitivity as if my skin had peeled right off”. Alone and afraid in Brussels, Sudjic returned again and again to her “talismans”, the six books she took with her, among them Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill. She is neither – or not yet – as ruthlessly perceptive as Cusk nor as exquisitely profound as Offill. But at her best Sudjic shares with both a preternatural sensitivity to the crackling electric currents that run beneath the surface of things. Her writing, like theirs, is marked out by its precision, not just in the words that she chooses but in the many she leaves out. She sees what they see, that it is often in the passages of greatest restraint that a writer finds her greatest power. She is funny, too. Piercing the uneasy atmosphere are some bracingly sharp flashes of dark humour.
Asylum Road explodes the comfortable myth that we can shut ourselves down, that narrowing our emotional register will allow us to escape our memories. It is not a novel that is easily forgotten. Sudjic is not herself a survivor of Sarajevo – she was born in London – but by compelling us to feel as Anya feels, to bear witness to the harrowing legacy of a war that dominated our television screens but not, perhaps, our hearts, she incriminates us all. As one character angrily demands: “We’re supposed to be grateful that they tuned in to watch us dying?” Those of us who can remember watching are left with an uncomfortable feeling of complicity, our own survivors’ guilt.
• Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
