Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson

As you may know, if you’ve been here for a while, my doctoral thesis looked at fantastic novels – specifically those aimed at a middlebrow audience, published between the World Wars. By ‘fantastic’, I mean that they are set in this world, but with an element of fantasy in them. So not fantasy authors like Tolkien, who create entirely new worlds. Rather, we are in a recognisable England – or wherever – and a lady turns into a fox. A woman accidentally conjures her imaginary childhood best friend to life. A staircase moves around a house, and people forget what’s happened in the room at the top of it whenever they leave.

It’s still my favourite genre – but how do you find it? They’re not exactly grouped together in the bookshop. So I’m always on the lookout, and I was drawn to Nothing To See Here (2019) by Kevin Wilson as soon as I heard the premise: it’s about twin children who spontaneously combust. Not just once – they do it regularly and (to them) painlessly. Fantastic plot AND twins? Yes pls. So thanks very much, Mum and Dad, for getting it for me for Christmas.

The narrator of Nothing To See Here is Lillian. She has grown up in a working-class family with a mother who barely pays her attention and very few expectations for her life – but she is gifted, and that helps her find a place at a prestigious boarding school. She feels alienated from the wealthy, selfish people who surround her – but makes a friend in Madison, who is no less wealthy than the others, but is friendly.

Until… Madison is found with drugs. Her family persuade Lillian to take the fall for this indiscretion, assuring her that she’ll be let off with a slap on the wrist. Instead, she is expelled. Her one chance of making something of her life is over. Despite this, Madison and Lillian remain penpals for years to come – not revealing much of their lives in these letters, and growing further and further apart in terms of the lives they lead. But when Madison needs help, it’s Lillian she turns to. (All of this is just backstory to the main event, but Wilson makes it compelling even while we rattle through it – the point is to indicate the sort of people we’re dealing with, and the hopelessness that now suffuses Lillian’s soulless day-to-day.)

Madison has married a Senator – one who is uptight and whose only concern is good PR for his career progression. He has twin children from his first marriage and they need somebody to look after them – a sort of governess.

“I guess I can do it,” I offered, so lame. I made my voice harden. I made my body turn into steel. “I’ll do it, Madison. I can do it.”

She reached across the sandwiches and hugged me, hard. “I can’t tell you how much I need you,” she said. “I don’t have anyone. I need you.”

“Okay,” I said. My whole life, maybe I was just biding time until Madison needed me again, until I was called into service and I made everything good. It honestly wasn’t a bad life, if that’s all it was.

That’s also a taste of Wilson’s writing. I really appreciated it – it is spare but characterful, giving us a sense of exactly who Lillian is, often with sad little twists to the end of thoughts, like the one above. I’m jumping ahead, but when Lillian accepts and moves into the guest house of the extremely rich family, there is this paragraph – and what a great second sentence it is:

I hadn’t brought anything with me. I knew that if I asked, a hairbrush would appear, a toothbrush and four different kinds of toothpaste, but I tried to pretend I was self-sufficient. A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.

That sort of phrasing wouldn’t work for every character, because not every character is given to pithy self-reflection – but Lillian is at a stage of her life where she is trying to work out how she’s got there, why she acts like she does, and what she might be able to change to avoid a future lived entirely in a rut. She’s also clearly very intelligent, and so those sort of internal reflections work for.

What Madison doesn’t initially mention is the whole spontaneous combustion thing. And the twins aren’t keen to move into their father’s estate with this new governess – here is the first time we see the combustion, with a twist to the end of the moment which I’m beginning to recognise as a Kevin Wilson flourish:

“I’m not coming with you!” Bessie shouted, and she found some hidden strength inside her, pulled free of my arms, and started to run for the house. I grabbed her ankle and she fell, hard, skinning her knee. Her shirt started smoking, the fabric singeing along the neckline, but it was soaking wet and couldn’t really catch fire. I realized there were delicate waves of yello flame moving up and down Bessie’s little arms. And then, like a crack of lightning, she burst fully into flames, her body a kind of firework, the fire white and blue and red all at once. It was beautiful, no lie, to watch a person burn.

Bessie is the dominant twin, feisty and occasionally violent. Roland tends to follow where she leads, though both of them are evidently hurt – maybe even traumatised. Not by their curious condition, but by a life of rejection by people who should love them. They haven’t had anybody they could truly trust, and neither they nor Lillian really know if she is trustworthy. Nobody has ever depended on her, and she finds connection with other people difficult. But she cares, and that is a good place to start.

The brilliance of Nothing To See Here, like so many fantastic novels, is that the strange premise is only a starting point for something much more grounded. Wilson’s novel is very moving, and the book is really about children who haven’t been properly cared for and a woman who is aimless. The spontaneous combustion is a hook on which to hang genuine emotions and fears. The book is often funny too, and that’s largely because of the breezy, devil-may-care narrative voice – Lillian hasn’t much to lose, and her interplay of defeatism and dawning hope is both touching and amusing.

I loved the book. It’s a page-turner and it’s much deeper than you might initially think. The logistics of the spontaneous combustion are explored but never fully worked out – Wilson is too wise to get buried into the whys and wherefores. His book is about people, not the mechanics of world-building. Whether or not you like a quirky idea at the heart of a novel, I think you could well love this book. He is a deceptively good writer, making it look easy, but Nothing To See Here is a very impressive achievement.