The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

by Emma Knight

Viking 2025

Emma Knight's high-profile fiction debut, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, opens with its main character, Penelope (shortened to the male “Pen”) Winters writing a letter to Lord Elliott Lennox, author of the successful mystery novels starring Inspector Robert Paquin. Pen is a student at the University of Edinburgh, and she's become convinced that Lord Lennox is at the heart of some kind of mystery her divorced and squabbling parents, particularly her withholding father, have been hiding from her for her entire life. She's decided to write to Lord Lennox directly, and a chunk of the letter is worth quoting:

My desire to reach you have overridden my Canadian obediencd, and I am writing to you care of your literary agent, against the reasonable advice of both receptionists at your publisher's. I want to assure you that this is not a crazed fan letter.

I believe you went to school with my dad, Edward (Ted) Winters. He is not the most forthcoming of conversationalists, as you may know, but I have pieced together some clues over the years, and they all lead to you.

I have recently moved to Edinburgh to begin a degree, and I wondered if there might be an opportunity to meet you. I can travel anywhere; this matter is as critical to my education as any.

If this letter starts to make the wary reader's instincts warble, the response Pen promptly gets won't help things any:

Delighted to receive your letter – glad you made it past the guards. Fond memories of your father. Hope he's well? Come east. Must show you the vistas and ruins of the Mearns, though perhaps not all at once. Saturday next? The train will take you as far as Stonehaven. Send your landing time and we'll send a good man with a good moustache named Hector (the man, that is).

If readers were in any doubt, this resolves it: The Life of the Common Octopus is a work of fantasy. These letters are dated 2006, but they might as well date from Alpha Centauri; people don't do these things or write these things or think these things or agree to these things in real life. For all else that it might be, Knight's debut will be a burlesque rather than a story about real people. So the sky's the limit.

Pen dutifully leaves her roommate and university friends and travels to the home of the wildly wealthy and eccentric Lennox family. And if some few remaining extremely naive readers are still wondering if the book's burlesque will extend to making the Lennox family a collection of swatches from fake-wealthy fictional families out of YA and Dark Academia, the lady of the house, Christina Lennox, greets Pen this way: “I suppose Hector left you on the doorstep like a parcel. We are brutes. How was your journey?”

In short order, Pen is introduced to Lord Lennox (“Have you frisked out guest for weapons?” “Would you like some absinthe, my dear?” “Klaatu barada nikto?”), Sasha Lennox, the family's dreamboat son who immediately makes Pen's heart variously pound and leap and do deep knee bends, and Sasha's cousin, a young woman with the man's name George. There are late night conversations that Knight doesn't include (why show us young people getting to know each other when you can just say they did?), equestrian outings that Knight doesn't describe, and growing suspicions in Pen's mind that Knight never attempts to create in the minds of her readers. “The whole family was too good at pretending, she decided,” she things instead; “she would never get the truth out of any of them.”

“Just turn off your brain,” advises Pen's performatively inclusive (and therefore insufferable) friend Alice once Pen returns to Edinburgh, and since Pen is clearly a self-insert main character, we reflexively get a clarification: “They both knew this was something Pen could never do, no matter how much vodka she drank.” Pen's superb intelligence, memory, and mental awareness are alluded to or outright claimed throughout the book, although since those things are never actually demonstrated, it's safe to assume they're just the inclusions of a proud creator.

There is indeed a secret being kept by Pen's father and the Lennox family, and Knight makes an attempt at the obvious red herring – that Pen herself is the daughter of Lord Lennox, which would send a genuine shiver through the whole plot of Pen's romantic infatuation with Sasha. It's not a good attempt, although it does depressingly detour the narrative from a book it might have been.

There's likewise an attempt at a plot twist at the end, depressingly connected to the common octopus, alas; when a writer like Knight, whose knowledge of, interest in, or exposure to the natural world extends just about as far as flushing a pet goldfish down the toilet, invokes any kind of animal, you know some unbearably heavy-handed allegorizing is trundling your way eventually, but it, too, isn't a very good attempt.

There's some eloquent writing (“She had the kind of unassuming, watercolour beauty that called birch trees to mind,” and the like), a real energy that might be harnessed to less hammy ends in future novels. But for now? We're simply beastly, aren't we?

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News