Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic
Review by Hannah Clark
Derived from the Greek word asulon and then Romanised into the word we use today, ‘asylum’ means ‘refuge’; yet it is most synonymous with the inhumane facilities that emerged across Europe and America in the nineteenth century, designed to keep those experiencing mental or emotional distress separate from the rest of society.
In Olivia Sudjic’s exceptional second novel Asylum Road, named after a street in London’s Peckham district, the protagonist, Anya, is struggling to keep up with the various demands she has placed upon herself. She is trying to complete a PhD thesis that has begun to run away from her, while maintaining a relationship with Luke, who she doubts loves her. She agonises over how others perceive her, especially the emotionally cool Luke, who is the centre of Anya’s world, and the yard-stick by which she measures herself. She constantly monitors his behaviour and his reactions to her, second-guessing what each of his silences might imply about her own worth.
Within the first few pages, Luke calls her ‘Loris’ — ‘one in a series of names’ that Luke uses. She goes on to muse about the deadly venom the loris possesses, ‘even with its teeth removed’. We see Anya obsessively checking her chin for protruding hairs, a nervous tic that Luke has likened to stereotypical behaviour exhibited by animals in captivity. It is something she does, Anya explains to the reader, in order to ensure she is viewed as ‘civilised’. Reminiscent of William Golding’s beautifully experimental The Inheritors, this novel carefully presents a protagonist who immediately demonstrates to the reader that they are different from us in some hazy, amorphous way, but is easy to relate to with extreme empathy.
Like Golding, what Sudjic does so well is to force the reader to confront their own privilege by leaving them no choice but to consider Anya’s ‘otherness’. That identity is formed in part from her observations of Luke, who is perceived by Anya to be the pinnacle of normality and respectability, with his nice middle-class upbringing, and easy expectation of life to be a gentle, well-rounded thing.
Gradually, her life story is unveiled, and the reader learns that Anya fled besieged Sarajevo as a child, leaving her parents beind, to go and live with her aunt in the UK. Anya points a finger at the reader: this is not just unknowable, difficult Luke, but British society in general that makes it so difficult for a person to feel known and seen, and to carve out a space for themselves in a society that rewards conformity above all else.
When Luke proposes to Anya, her past trauma begins to surface, pressing uncomfortably against the life she has carved for herself, making her question what it means to be secure, and whether one can ever truly reach a place of safety, and indeed, what ‘safety’ even means when the assumed definition contrasts so starkly with the notion of our own identity.
Asylum Road is a delight — by turns, blackly comic and heart-shattering. There is often the sense that the real story is happening between the words on the page, like the memory of a dream tucked in some nook of the mind, just out of reach but tantalisingly close if you could just angle yourself correctly to reach it.
Asylum Road is published by Bloomsbury on 21st January 2021