This is the debut novel by Daisy Lafarge (a poet shortlisted for the 2020 TS Eliot Prize for her collection “Life Without Air”).

Pre-publication it was the 2019 recipient of a Betty Trask Award – an award set up to fund “first novels written by authors under the age of 35 in a traditional or romantic, but not experimental, style” in something of a Vintage year (with other winners including Samuel Fisher’s “The Chameleon”, Imogen Hermes Gowar’s Women’s Prize shortlisted “The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock”, Sophie Makintosh’s Booker longlisted “The Water Cure” and the Guardian Not the Booker Prize winner (in a year when I was a judge) Rebecca Ley’s “Sweet Fruit, Sour Land”.

The novel is told in the first person (with a mix of tenses) by Frances – she is a graduate from England studying in Paris a French medieval manuscript believed to possibly have been a primer for Children (the significance of this was slightly lost on me), before some form of incident with her supervisor (A.B.) causes her to want to leave Paris – and instead she decides to spend a Summer visiting organic farms across France where she will work for her board and lodgings.

The first farm she visits is called Noa Noa, a kind of eco-farm/artistic commune run by the older but still, to Frances, charismatic Paul: a wannabe anthropologist and part time arty photographer, who takes any opportunity to regale listeners with tales of the time he lived almost as a native in Tahiti (after which the farm is named).

Frances, still coming to terms with what happened to her in Paris, and who we realise over time has the tendency to lapse into extreme withdrawal, falls under Paul’s influence. Eventually she withdraws to a second farm but circumstances force her back into his orbit despite increasing evidence of his patriarchal control of her and of a shadier side to his time in Tahiti, as the two travel around France visiting Paul’s acquaintances.

I have read a number of debut novels by poets recently – and many I think have naturally adopted the slightly experimental fragmentary style that is currently in-vogue in literature, as it represents a natural transition from their poetical background. By contrast this is I would say a more conventional fictional novel in form although with the occasional use of imaginative metaphors.

This is a book where the epigraphs tell you a lot about the novel’s plot, influences and themes. Claude Levi Strauss talks abut the danger of Anthropology being “the complete absoption of the observer by the object of his observations”; Susan Sontag of the “Compulsion to be what the other wants” – both of which describe Frances’s fate. And the third epigraph is from Paul Gaugin’s book “Noa Noa; The Voyage to Tahiti” of which, increasingly the reader realises, this is a rewrite.

Now in respect to a novel about a dominant patriarchal man largely telling a younger woman what she is feeling and meaning I am rather aware of the irony of me critiquing it – but this is meant to be a review so I would be remiss not to admit that there were aspects of the book I did not really like, many of which are pet peeves of mine. A few examples: a first party narrator who is withholding something from the reader (in this case what happened with A.B) – although later development make it clearer that Frances herself struggles to process the events; a character in a story who says “I was a character in a story, whose situation represents their symbolic isolation”; names whose symbolism (St Paul and St Francis, Frances = France’s, the chain of Paul’s boulangeries) are spelled out by other characters in case the reader missed them; and characters speaking entirely in French rendered in English but with occasional French words and phrases. I think my bigger issue though was with Paul and the characters who surround him – my greatest sympathy with a side-character called Oliver who rails against “pseudo eco-warriors” and how much they annoy him – and so despair that an intelligent, independent woman would need to fall into his clutches.

In its depiction of patriarchy, of toxic relationships, and of repeating behaviour and of the aftermath of breakdown – this is one that I think would particular appeal to fans of Megan Nolan’s “Acts of Desperation” (so that I was very interested to see her blurbing the book), to backpackers with a love of Southern France or to those more familiar with Gaugin and able to pick up on resonances I am sure I missed.

There's much that I liked about this book but it feels a bit like lots of themes are kick-started but don't really come together as much as I'd have liked. Issues of asymmetrical sexual relationships are clear, but some of the writing is more heavy-handed than it needs be: 'Last night he'd been frustrated because I was dry again; I told him I was just tired, or dehydrated. He handed me the half-empty bottle of water we'd had in the car and told me to sort it out.'

Given the epigraphs from anthropologists, it takes some time before Paul's behaviour in Tahiti comes out and then it's at the end of the book and isn't treated with the intellectual nuance it deserves: how do we judge behaviour that is criminal in one culture and perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, in another? Interesting question that gets swept away under a single and straightforward rubric of sexual exploitation. It plays to a popular morality but does leave the book sidestepping any more challenging questions.

So more focus, more depth, more intellectual engagement with the issues raised, more subtlety would have raised my rating - but a book worth reading all the same.