One of the most striking aspects of Sharon Kernot’s verse novel Night Swimming is its portrayal of insomnia, in both its physical strain and its maddening psychological effects.
January Clare Colson, Kernot’s protagonist, has suffered bouts of insomnia alongside intense parasomnias – sleep paralysis, sleepwalking, hallucinatory nightmares – since the death of her best friend, Julie, at the age of 16, and she survives largely by self-medicating with red wine and sleeping pills.
In early scenes, we witness Clare lying to a doctor to get a new prescription, her desperation running right through the encounter, and listen to her list the well-meaning but infuriating advice people like to give her (“You need to go to bed earlier/ Or get up earlier/ Get some morning sunshine/ Meditate”). It is clear that Clare is barely holding herself and her life together.
What sets Clare’s disintegration into motion is the appearance of a man at the front counter of the social services agency where she is employed, whom she immediately recognises from her reckless teenage years (“the past presents itself in the shape of a man”). The man, who remains unnamed for the duration of the novel, was once the object of a shared and competitive attraction in Clare and her friend, fuelled by the twin intensities of adolescence and transgression – and he disappeared so completely after Julie’s death that Clare was unable to prove his existence to investigating police. He is still attractive, “wolfish” and athletic, and Clare cannot help but pursue him, her old desire and her need for answers driving her on.
Kernot has previously published two young adult verse novels including the award-winning Birdy in 2024, as well as one traditional novel in 2013. The verse novel is a form beautifully suited to Night Swimming’s subject matter, its fragmented intensity eerily redolent of sleep-deprived irrationality and its rapid pace contributing to the dread and suspense at the heart of the thriller. Night Swimming also sits within a lineage of Australian verse novels, with the influence of Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask especially clear.
Where Porter is self-conscious in the poetry references within her novel, including poets and poetry readings as suspects and investigation scenes respectively, it is the contemporary thriller that Kernot is playing with here. Her unstable female protagonist is an obvious nod to that but so too are scenes in which Clare stakes out the man’s house (having copied his address from her agency’s database) and effects a home-hairdressing disguise with a pair of scissors and box of dye.
What is most masterful, though, is Kernot’s control over the slow unfurling of Clare’s backstory – details of her teenage hijinks with Julie and of what transpired on the night of Julie’s death – and the way that these small revelations constantly shift the reader’s understanding of her character and sympathies towards her. These shifts are subtle but they work by accrual, until it becomes clear that Clare may not just be unstable but untrustworthy as well. There’s something gripping about these revelations, especially because they occur alongside Clare’s deepening obsession with the man from her past. That her pursuit of the man is as genuinely desirous as it is motivated by her search for answers muddies the waters even further, and it is deliciously compelling to boot.
Night Swimming is a tremendously satisfying novel – it is sharp, sexy and exciting, and it progresses with an impeccable narrative logic. Clare’s interior world, and her ever-increasing desperation, are finely drawn and captivating. There something intensely beautiful and painful in her memories of teenage friendship and the nascent sexuality of that age. It is a complex and compelling novel, and great fun to read.