Never Was by H. Gareth Gavin
H. Gareth Gavin's experimental novel defies categorisation, exploring the common, queered experience of depersonalisation
Daniel isn’t sure how he got here. Or where exactly here is. He just knows that the person he has just dragged out of the ditch, Fin, threw this after-party. Fin is famous, or something, but the ketamine coursing through Daniel’s bloodstream isn’t helping to make sense of the scene.
In such a haze is set Never Was, H. Gareth Gavin’s novel so detached from time and place that one must find the markers of late-nineties/early-noughties Britain that pepper the story: in a McDonald’s car park; in soap operas; in pebbledashed, lopsided houses in starved, post-industrial towns. These symbols of capitalism act as reminders for the rigidity of a context that demands its inhabitants be as easy to exploit as possible. How else can corporations do it effectively? In fact, published in exactly this context, the book itself feels radical in its own rejection of genre or a Goodreads-friendly hook.
Like its characters, the book is at once at peace and in growing discomfort with its own form. It shows an awareness of itself, its non-conformist beauty a result of the stifling nature of language. Each page margin and paragraph indent reinforces the trans metaphor that comes to fruition when other words cease to be enough. The common, queered experience of depersonalisation is shown beautifully in a text as deliberate with its typography as it is evocative in its imagery.