Hot Milk - Deborah Levy

When Sam Taylor-Johnson was working on her initial treatment for the 50 Shades of Grey film, she struggled to find a way to reproduce the experience of female sexual fulfilment on screen. Inspiration took an unlikely form: “We went to a beautiful aquarium and there were these jellyfish. They’re so sexual, jellyfish, when you look at them in tanks – just the way they move, the fluidity. So there was a scene when we go into Anastasia’s world and her head, and we just had these jellyfish on the screen. It was beautiful, very impressionistic.” Sadly, the jellyfish never made the final cut (‘Everyone went, ‘What the fuck are those jellyfish doing there?’”), which is faintly amazing considering some of the stuff that did.

The link between jellyfish and female sexuality is explored further in Deborah Levy’s novel Hot Milk. The jellyfish, known as Medusas, which lurk off the coast of Spain are transparent, and hard to spot, but their effects are striking, leaving 'purple whiplash welts' on the skin which require urgent treatment. Throughout the novel, Levy returns to the physical and psychological effect of these stings on her protagonist.

The action of Hot Milk takes place during the summer of 2015, between Almeria and Athens. Sofia, a 25 year old with an MA in Anthropology, currently working in an artisan coffee shop in London, accompanies her mother, Rose, as she receives treatment for a series of mysterious ailments which have left her unable to walk.  There is something contagious about Rose’s condition: her consultant, the charismatic Dr Gomez, observes that ‘her symptoms are of cultural interest to me, even though they drag me down with her'; Sofia sometimes finds herself walking with a limp, in physiological sympathy with her mother.

In Gomez’s clinic, and in their holiday home, Sofia is frequently asked to play the role of silent onlooker in her mother's psychodrama, watching on as Rose dictates her case histories. Her role as carer has trapped her in a permanent state of childish deference to her mother ('I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can remember.') Levy contrasts this parent-child relationship with two other families. Dr Gomez works with his daughter, deliberately keeping her close. She presents a passive public face, but drinks heavily to vent her frustrations. Sofia’s father, meanwhile, is in a relationship with a woman close to his daughter’s age. Although she appears childlike, with her rabbit slippers and orthodontic brace, Evangeline is revealed to be a more dynamic presence, with a high-powered career behind her. It is the recession, along with her relationship and her baby, which have infantilised her. 

As in Levy’s previous novel, the Booker-nominated Swimming Home, a stranger injects an element of danger and sexuality into the holidaymakers’ lives. Here, Sofia falls into a semi-platonic relationship with the intense, possessive Ingrid. Ingrid takes on a dominant role; as the Medusa jellyfish shocked Sofia’s body into consciousness, Ingrid affects her psychologically: 'Everything I know about myself is cracking, and Ingrid is the hammer'. However, Sofia soon comes to realise the limitations of her submissive role, struggling under the weight of being ‘beloved’, an owned object. Her encounter with the jellyfish inspires her to take on a new role: embracing the identity of Medusa, the scarred monster. Her vivid stings are an outward sign of otherness, a willingness to tarnish her pristine appearance: 'I had been stung into desire. It would be true to say I was very bold'.

The collapse of the Spanish and Greek economies lingers in the background of Hot Milk. The reader is constantly aware that the characters inhabit a Europe of diminished opportunities. It is interesting that austerity is often linked to medicine in the public imagination, as a purgative or shock treatment administered to a compliant body politic by experts. Levy refers throughout the text to patterns of submissiveness, treatment and rebellion, which can be found in the relationships between the Greek and Spanish people and the austerity-peddling economists, between Rose and her consultant, and between Sofia and Ingrid.

Hot Milk is an elliptical, elusive book; alongside the Freudian analysis of family relationships and psychosomatic disease, Levy returns to themes of ownership, debt and agency throughout the text, but the style is sensory, rather than didactic. On the sentence level, the writing has an understated beauty; as a whole, this is an atmospheric, intoxicating novel. Levy is an influential voice, who has inspired a range of talented, diverse writers including Joanna Walsh and Meike Zeirvogel, and her own work remains challenging and vital.