Little Scratch

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This debut novel will I think be one of the most innovative I read in 2021 – and I would be not be surprised to see it featuring on both the Women’s Prize and Goldsmith Prize lists. The Goldsmith was of course won in its first year by Eimear McBride’s harrowing stream-of-consciousness novel “A Girl is a Half Formed Thing” which is the only time ever I have listened to an audiobook as a way of gaining entry to a book I had found it difficult to access in print (just for reference in a typical year I read around 150 novels and listen to 0 audiobooks) – allowing me then to read the novel. This morning, turning so that my eyes levelled with the bedside table, I saw two things: my phone flashing and spluttering away as the alarm went off, and Rebecca Watson’s novel Little Scratch. These first moments of awakening are captured by Watson in the first line of the novel: “I am traveling through, passing my own capillaries, red lines rushing by.” I decided my phone should have a longer lie-in than me and reached for Watson’s debut novel . Overall. 4.5 stars - and a strong contender for the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. [Addition - which it indeed made!] I saw Rebecca Watson at Charleston, Sussex (20.05.2022) in conversation with Lucy Kirkwood (author of Maryland), moderated by Katie Mitchell. I usually find the assumptions funny or psychologically interesting, at other times a tedious balancing act of correcting or letting go. People’s reactions are not mine to control; nor, in a way, is the book.

The text seems to be partly autobiographical. Like the narrator, Watson has worked at various roles in her life (as an assistant, waitress, cleaner) where she was at the bottom of the power chain: “I have been screamed at, groped, and patronised in various junior jobs. What has always been clear is that while some enjoy the power, others seem to genuinely believe that the divide in front of them is dictated by God, that hierarchy has a moral, qualitative value.” ( Source) Adapted from Rebecca Watson’s ‘daringly experimental debut’ novel ( Guardian), little scratch is a fearless and exhilarating account of a woman’s consciousness over the course of 24 hours. The charged narrative records in precise detail her impressions of a deceptively ordinary day - the daily commute, office politics and a constant barrage of texts on WhatsApp – and as the day goes on, she gradually starts to unveil the trauma of a rape that is consuming her. Exploring how the human mind internalizes, distracts, and survives the darkest moments, Katie Mitchell, with sound score by Melanie Wilson, brings Miriam Battye’s adaptation to compelling life.T he story works on several levels and, within a minute, can draw both wry humour and gnawing horror from office life, and find weary familiarity and startling surprise in everyday routines.'

Mitchell’s usual sound designer Melanie Wilson is on hand to add atmospheric flourishes, notably an injection of ambient dread at the right moments and a few swish surround sound effects.'little scratch is about the coexistence of monotony with our waking, intelligent lives. It is a powerful evocation of how the external and internal aspects of our lives exist in a helix, and what it means to live out the course of a single day consumed by trauma. She is unable to speak for a variety of confused and confusing reasons: fear that he will not understand; an internal conflict between a self that seeks to mitigate what has happened to her (she hasn’t been killed, she wasn’t chained up in an underground room) and another that is loudly, angrily insistent on naming what has been done; a desire to keep the world as it was before, and herself in it, unharmed – not least so that she can preserve herself as a sexual being. This is not just a clear-eyed examination of the outrage of rape and its corrosive aftermath; it is an experiential testament to what it is to move through the male-dominated world as a woman. It’s extraordinary – and indispensable.'