Heatwave by Victor Jestin Review

It’s a sweltering August on a French beach campsite and teenage boy Leonard is there with his family for a summer holiday. And then, one night, Leonard watches a boy called Oscar strangle to death on a swing - and doesn’t step in to help. Even stranger, Leonard then decides to bury the body and tell no-one about it! With a mere day left of his holiday before he returns home, will Leonard’s actions be found out or will his secret lie buried along with Oscar?

Victor Jestin’s debut novel Heatwave has an intriguing premise that unfortunately turns out to be only that as what follows isn’t particularly interesting or memorable.

I wonder if this novel is intended as a modern retelling of Camus’ The Outsider, because Leonard is certainly that - an awkward loner who doesn’t fit into society or really understand how to or want to fit in - and the story centres around a singular death (there are also more superficial similarities like the beach setting, the length of the novel and both authors’ French nationalities).

If so, could Leo be an unreliable narrator and, like in Camus’ novel, the death that occurs is a murder - did Leo actually murder Oscar, because he was jealous of his being with Luce, the girl he fancies, and Leo distanced himself from the crime like he distances himself from everything else in his life, pretending the swings killed him instead? It would explain the bizarre choice of not alerting anyone to Oscar’s accidental death and implicating himself unnecessarily.

That’s a longshot interpretation though and not the one I believe is Jestin’s point. Given the numerous references to the unusually extreme weather, I think Leonard watching as life is destroyed in front of him without doing anything about it is meant to be a metaphor of how humanity is destroying the planet and we’re all complicit in not doing enough to prevent this, just sitting back and watching, even though it means our own destruction too. That’s reflected in Leo’s character arc too, beginning with being inactive to ending with being active, even though it’s too late (for him/for the planet).

It’s well-written, particularly given Jestin’s youthful age of 26 (what is it about France that produces such brilliant writers so young - Rimbaud, Sagan, etc.?), it’s just a shame there isn’t much about the narrative that’s compelling. Teenage alienation, embarrassing moments as boys and girls flirt, that confusing transition phase to young adulthood and all the baggage that comes with it - besides the opening scene, there’s little else in the book to hold the attention.

Victor Jestin seems to have the talent to probably one day write a great novel but his debut, Heatwave, is an insubstantial and underwhelming one - not so much hot as barely tepid.