The job of the novel is not only to tell a story but to edit it to fit some kind of purpose that is its raison d’être. Yet simultaneously questioning its own purpose has also been a feature of the novel since its inception in the best novelists. In a recent example from those written by the ‘best novelists’ of our time,, William Rayfet Hunter’s debut novel Sunstruck (2025), the story is often about the dual function of telling stories in society. David Blake is a powerful man who gets what he wants. Is he describing the novelist’s function when he says? “There are people whose job it is to make things look a certain way. Spin a certain narrative. Control the story. It will come as no surprise to you that I’ve had my reasons to employ those people in the past’.[1] Another way of looking at this issue is to ask why, when it is so important to the developments in this novel is the story of the death of Rayshard Brooks so thinly told and his name not mentioned by the novel’s very unreliable narrator.
In many ways, Sunstruck might seem to be a kind of exploratory queer romance novel in which a narrator learns that to love another man, he must stop valuing white men as the only possessors of romantic value. Indeed some male queer novels that primarily explore the experience of Black men have had that theme too; partially (as in the case of Okechukwu Nzelu’s ‘The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney’ (2019)) or more fully (as in Michael Donkor (2024) ‘Grow Where They Fall’) – there are blogs at the link in each case. But this novel feels very different. First the narrator’s relation to ‘race’ is often disguised or unspoken for long periods. Other than being given the name ‘Whiteboy’ by the wonderful Jazz who ‘called herself’ his ‘only Black friend’, the narrator, the son of an absent Jamaican man and a very mentally ill white mother, and in the care of his stoic paternal grandmother, the narrator is never named properly.[2]
He is spoken of later in a national newspaper gossip column, invented for the novel, as a ‘dark mystery stranger’.[3] When he first meets the glamorously rich bourgeois Blake family in their chateau in France, we are told that there ‘are introductions to be made before we eat’, but we are only introduced to the Blakes and their extended chosen family of followers.[4] His relationship to the circumambient racism in the sections of society selectively pictured by the novel (those the narrator himself largely chooses) is itself ambiguous. But the thing that you can’t fail to notice in this novel is how persistently the narrator misses the clues that every reader must see that the man he loves, the actor (in every sense of the word) Felix Blake is far from a wise choice of love object, and that the rather lovely (and Black Lives Matter politicised) Caleb is the man for whom he ought to see he has more chance of mutual understanding.
The Blakes first give away is to hold, ironically, a ‘White Party’ without explain to the narrator what such a party entailed – it actually means a party where all guests wear white clothing only. Dressed in anything but white he ‘suddenly feels weirdly naked’.[5] The level of neglect involved almost feels as vindictive (even though unintentional) as the clothing advice Mrs Danvers gives the unnamed narrator in Chapter 16 of Rebecca.
In another party later in the novel, the narrator hears Felix’s best college friends (whilst he studiously avoids texts from Jazz and his grandmother (his only links to the Black community, in short)), and when he is already the secret lover of Felix – secret on Felix’s choice and command – talking about ‘that Black kid’:
“Lilly’s mate. Hangs around Blake all the time. … “… Blake says he can’t get rid of him. Feels sorry for him. It’s a bit tragic., if you ask me”.[6]
Even when Felix uses the N… word totally inappropriately – for any passion he might have about having discovered that the narrator had been sexually unfaithful is not reflected in the many secret sexual infidelities he has with other white men and women, whilst the the narrator and he are secret lovers. The reader has long grasped that the Blakes are racist – have even (as he has) been shown that to be likely to be the case by Jazz – and are only surprised by the narrator’s reaction to the foul drunken speech of Felix, as he drives the car with the narrator in it so calamitously; interpreting it as he does mainly as a kind of power imbalance common in all love relationships, and one that later he yet again ‘forgives’ the abuser for demonstrating in so racist a fashion.
“Slow the fuck down, Felix – this isn’t funny.”
“Funny? Do you want to know what’s fucking funny, darling?”
He spits this last word and saliva lands on the steering wheel. “What’s funny is that you thought I wouldn’t find out about your little nigger boyfriend”.
My lungs feel like they are being crushed. In this wretched moment, I see things clearly. I realise that this is what it means to be in love. You give someone else the power to destroy you. …[7]
Any reader reading this finds the narrator’s discovery far from clearly the correct one. He does not give either Felix or the rest of the Blakes the ‘power to destroy’ him – they already had that entitlement in buckets as his employer, funder, hospitality givers and as white capitalists in charge even with of the networks that might gain him entry to music school. They fund his grandmother’s social care, they even are his (and his mother’s) music idols in the form of Annie Blake (née Carpenter); any resemblance to the historic real world (outside the novel) Carpenters is forgivable fiction but immensely wonderful in its satiric effect: ‘Growing up with Mum, Annie Carpenter’s voice was the soundtrack to our life’.[8]
It is Annie, who married David Blake, apparently for his money and status, who underlines and is aware of being thought a ‘gold-digger’ who shows that money and whatever we do to sell ourselves out for it is not the issue:
“… But it was never about money, no. The only thing that matters is power. Nothing else. Not money, not beauty, not charm, not talent. None of that means anything unless it makes you powerful. When you have power, you have control. Over the people around you, over the truth, over the who fucking country. But most importantly, you control yourself. When you are powerful, you are actually, truly, free.”[9]
Though Karen Anne Carpenter married a real-estate developer older than herself, the analogues between her tragic life and the Annie in the novel are few except that her songs did speak for a generation of women.
And it is this issue of personal freedom to be and appear who you wish to be that matters in the novel as a whole: it is an illusion the narrator seeks and never gets, as he realises that the ‘truth’ you have to tell is dependent on the power to promote a version of it that suits yourself, and erases the rights of others – whether as individuals or representatives of less powerful groups. In my title I say:
David Blake is a powerful man who gets what he wants. Is he describing the novelist’s function when he says? “There are people whose job it is to make things look a certain way. Spin a certain narrative. Control the story. It will come as no surprise to you that I’ve had my reasons to employ those people in the past’.[10]
The simple answer to my ironic question is ‘no’. He is in fact talking about the public relations personae, to use a politer name for professional spin-doctors, that he can employ to ‘control the story’ told about him and present his narrative as he needs it be to demonstrate and maintain not only his power but to make it look good, clean it up. It is a version of the power to control that you can use wealth to buy those people in your employ to spin stories convenient to its maintenance and its good looks. Earlier we saw Annie exercising this power to ‘clean up’ the mess of a past party, but Felix points out that Blakes use their power, usually via the ability to pay others, to take control, even to the point of making real things, and as we shall learn, real people and their stories ‘disappear’. After the narrator wakes up to find the chateau cleaned up (physically at least) from the night before, we hear:
A cleaned up French chateau
“I’m so sorry, I must have slept through the clean-up,” I say to no one in particular.
“Not at all, sweetie,” answers Fizz, giving me a bemused look. “Annie had some girls from the village come and clear everything away before any of us were up. Isn’t that marvellous?”
“Yes, it’s remarkable what you can make disappear when you have the right people to clean it up.” This comes from Felix, who is looking at David, …[11]
The abusive use of power to control is used in all kinds of situation, even in the possession of a fancy car and the assumed right taken to drive it badly unchallenged, even by the narrator (who sometimes embraces powerlessness like a right) when intoxicated and out of any control others might find reasonable:
A couple step onto the crossing and Felix flings the car around them, holding down the horn and throwing back his head to laugh. I wonder why I let him get behind the wheel. But this is how it always is, isn’t it? When faced with Felix’s impulses, I am completely powerless. …[12]
All of the Blakes, however apparently antagonistic to their own family’s tendency to use power against the more vulnerable, as young Dot is (for even dots finish the planned sentences of the powerful), in the end validate and support that power. It is the power that makes their family home in London ‘The House’: ‘The House, they call it, as if it’s the only one that mattered’.[13] And it draws people in by paying them in subtle or non-subtle ways. They control domains – like that of the tokenistic Black Tory MP for Kensington, Caroline Elisabeth Asiamah (‘Creepy Caroline’ as Lily calls her).[14] It is she who spins stories to marginalise Black protest, to stop the world being ‘swayed by misguided notions of political correctness’ and supports police violence that has led to dangerous injury of J, the peaceful Black Lives activist.[15] When Black Lives Activists led by Jazz decide that ‘We are taking back our story’, Caroline takes the fall for the Blakes, for after all she knows she was their ‘Uncle Tom’.[16]
If even Annie knows she can be thought a ‘gold-digger’ for Blake power, then we see the Blake’s replicate this in others – in the appalling Simon Chance and those he takes under him to dominate also. The equally appalling Celeste knows that everybody ‘here thinks I’m a whore’ but also knows ‘there’s nothing I can do about it’.[17] People get locked into relationships that look like prostitution, either as wage slaves or ‘lovers’. But does that not even apply to the narrator who gains power almost invisibly in the novel as his secreted relationship to Felix becomes established within the Blake family. He gets a comfortable job under David and Simon. When they ‘lose’ staff, it is the longer-serving who go not him – he gets promoted. The sacked employee, Tim, accuses the narrator of playing the ‘little diversity hire’ card but gets it more on the nose, whilst naming the wrong cock, when he sees the narrator as being paid for sexual services: ‘Did you suck Simon off for that one too?”[18] He accepts, even without it being said, that Annie and David pay for the social care for his grandmother that he is unwilling to supply.
Two major symbols illustrate the price the narrator pays for giving in to the white party of the Blakes, that of the trap, and pursuit by the flies that seek the corruption of the body. As I read I toyed with the idea that the flies that punish people for overindulgence in ‘honey’ – the book splits into sections called Honey and Flies – flies became a symbol for the Furies in Sartre’s retelling of The Oresteia, Les Mouches (The Flies).
Furies and Flies are both punishing traps for a misuse of freedom. In listening to the story of the death of Rayshard Brooks, the narrator hears, as he opens his chat app, ‘A million voices chattering at once across the Atlantic, an incessant drone, the hum and click of a swarm of angry insects’.[19]
Yet the retribution here comes from angry Black voices asserting rights over their oppression (for this is where the narrator is ‘at’ mentally half-way through the novel). The feelings above prompt a memory of being trapped by a black ‘cousin’, in a shed he calls a ‘trap’, where he liberates from a sack of decaying flesh a swarm of Sartrean fury-flies. Indeed, everything is a concealed trap thence up to the mirrors Felix wittily covers to conceal that he himself is the trap::
Felix shrouds the mirror in a thick embroidered throw and winks at me. Some say a covered mirror prevents a soul from getting trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead. I wonder what lost, dead things here are in need of release.[20]
Later, the trap, the idea prompted by a rat searching the dangerous area between the rails of oncoming tube trains, is a Skinner Box (not named as such but in the metaphor) or ‘operant conditioning chamber’ in which rats are conditioned to act in accordance with an experimental prediction in early behaviourist experiments.
Despite the danger, despite the light, it exposes itself here, in search of food, desperate to keep going. To stay alive.[21]
The rat is not unlike the narrator – noticing the slight signs given by the Blakes that he accept their subjugation, that keep him locked between the duties of a guest and a servant, accepting his powerlessness to their (to him unknown) rituals like pushing guest in pools. [22] They stun him with their spacious rooms (‘nearly the size of Grandma’s house’) and then place him in a luxury, but obviously a space ‘smaller than Felix’s but still big enough …’.[23]. They play with his guilt over accepting gifts in kind or money, but assert their rights over Jazz, ‘my “only Black friend”’.[24] They make him feel that he has not even any rights to feel emotions they freely feel – hurt by the clarity of the fact that Felix is still having secret sex with the young local guy, Etienne and that he must accept what feels to him, a humiliation:
… Etienne says he is sorry and didn’t mean to upset me and I hear myself saying I am not upset but even as I say that my voice cracks again. .. The embarrassment of feeling something I have no right to feel returns and mingles with my ire, a burning knot lodging itself behind my breastbone.[25]
Subjugating his rights, here to feel things in the way humans oft do, is the order of the narrator’s life throughout, except the end when a genuine feeling for Caleb grows in harrowed soil (harrowed by Felix) and eventually the right to tell his story and maintain his own self-esteem, for that power he has given over to Felix and his family – even to the turned non-binary mouse, Dot. He says near the end to Felix:
“… . For once I want people to know I’m yours.”
“That’s just it though, don’t you get it? You are mine. I own you. You think you have any power here? You get all upset and have your little outbursts and then I click my fingers and you come running right back. I sometimes think you’re a bit unhinged. I feel sad for you. That stuff runs in families, you know. Maybe you got it from your mum”.[26]
Once the narrator has admitted the role of his mother’s mental illness in his life, his story and self-interpretation are given over and will be used by every Blake to harm him. There is no power to ‘clean up’ one’s own story as the Blakes do as a matter of course. But has not the narrator embraced that role voluntarily? As a sexual being he is never asked if he is a top or a bottom in sex or whether he rejects that pernicious entrapping binary. He is the perennial bottom – even with a German boy he remembers meeting in his youth, who for him takes on, metaphorically, the natural power of an incoming tidal sea – it’s a great passage that requires reading: whose meaning is ‘I understood I was meant to follow’, not lead, guiding ‘ my face to where he wanted it to be’ to take in his cock.[27] The story is there to underlie the story of Felix’s seduction of him with honey (that looks like ‘gold’, at the end of that eponymous section of the novel.
… The gold in his eyes catches fire as he feeds me the last of the honey.
“I want you,” he says to me.
So, I give him what he wants. ….
And he has not given up with last phrase yet. It forms him succumbing to return of sexual giving and the last sentence of the section, Honey.
“I want you to cum for me,” he says.
So, I give him what he wants. … He collapses above me and I let the weight of his body push me into the sand …
Eventually, we have enough breath to speak.
“Please come to London, for me, “ he says.
So I give him what he wants again.[28]
The narrator thinks that the giving (or selling as he must be forced to see it) of his beauty to others will gain him some power and control – so do all the heterosexual women who become mistresses in the story – but he should have listened to the ‘fortune teller’, MME DE BENET, TAROT, VOYANCE ET CHIROMANCIE:
French Tarot card
… “So much love here too, little boy. Not all of it is wise to give, but you give it anyway. … There is power in beauty, and beauty in power. … A house built on shifting sands falls into the sea, mon cher. Little birds always fly back to their nests”.[29]
There is ‘power’ but not that power that gives control. The power that the Blakes have eventually – at least within the social, cultural, educational, aesthetic and political world they dominate, which is extensive and the public world of unspoken white male capitalist hegemonic power – is to erase any story that the narrator might think he has (again the analogy with Rebecca is precise, although that unnamed narrator wins the powerful at their own game). Asked to read about Felix’s acting triumph in the well-named show Uplands by Annie he searches ‘for my name’ (and still we don’t know that name) for Annie to rub it in: “you’re not mentioned at all”.[30]
This is the issue Jazz picks up when she storms Lily’s art show, apparently themed on the Atlanta, Georgia killing of Rayshard Brooks and those of other Black Americans and celebrating Black activist lives like Jazz’s. However the photographs ‘were taken without our consent’ and:
Outside these doors of the gallery, the very people who marched that day are being refused entry as we speak. [31]
Excluded from the places where voices are meant to be heard in art, the marchers for Black Lives Matter are being refused entry because they want power and control over their own repressed, excluded, or marginalised stories. [31]. And this is happening now in ways the narrator perhaps might align with the Blakes’ power and control of his name and story, even to the point of erasure. When the flies of the story become Furies again, ‘fury is a forge’, burning as ‘it creates’. And the narrator says: ,I refuse to let myself be erased’. However, the names from his phone have been deleted as he says this by the agents of the Blakes. After he says it, the offers of a future in music rescinded, and his role in the Blake family life rubbed out of the official record. [32]. So much for cleaning up a narrative and spinning it differently. [33]
The odd thing, with almost the power of magical thinking, the narrator had believed that in coming out as Felix’s lover, in the light of the sun, he has come from under the shell that hides his ‘darker’ skin bur is this not the very moment he is literally ‘sunstruck‘ and sun stroke is far from a gentle touch [34].
In my title, I gave an alternative to the main one I chose, thus:
Another way of looking at this issue is to ask why, when it is so important to the developments in this novel is the story of the death of Rayshard Brooks so thinly told and his name not mentioned by the novel’s very unreliable narrator.
Rayshard Brooks
Like the narrator, Rayshard Brooks is not named in the novel, though clearly even the thinly told story fixes him there, amongst the triggers to The Black Lives Matter marches, including that in which J is nearly killed. The story begins to develop into its various forms from ‘just a single paragraph, bare bones, initial facts as presented’. Who controls the development of the story, or its squashing is yet to be determined, though Caroline gives it a stab. [35] The story’s right to be told the way black people are, and were telling it in the 2020s is even queried within the black community of the novel who are worried about the ‘racist point of view’ of things thinking all Black people violent. [36] Meanwhile, has the story of Rayshard Brooks got lost in history? For more on his story the story see The Guardian’s report from 2020, for there is a chance you may not remember it![37]
Meanwhile, one of the mechanisms of the loss of the Black community’s stories may be narrators who wish to present themselves as heroes to white people and as their rescuers. The prologue to this novel is, in fact, a fantasy version of the same scene that occurs in the process of the narration. But compare them! The Prologue makes the narrator, and fully acknowledges him as such in his reportage of a little white girl he rescues from a pool’s words, those of Dot. The actual scene is much more murky in it’s moral implications. [38]
Read the book. Please do.
Wirh love
Steven xxxxxxxxx
[1] William Rayfet Hunter (2025: 341) Sunstruck London, Merky Books / Penguin
[2] Ibid: 7, see 66 for example of Whiteboy appellation
[3] Ibid: 329
[4] Ibid: 12
[5] Ibid: 119
[6] Ibid: 246
[7] Ibid: 350
[8] Ibid: 45
[9] Ibid: 369
[10] ibid: 341
[11] Ibid: 155
[12] Ibid: 350
[13] Ibid: 183
[14] Ibid: 122
[15] Ibid: 217- 219.
[16] Ibid: 364f.
[17] Ibid: 145
[18] Ibid: 198
[19] Ibid: 179
[20] Ibid: 259
[21] Ibid: 301
[22] Ibid:16
[23] Ibid: 19, 26 respectively.
[24] Ibid: 7
[25] Ibid: 137
[26] Ibid: 345
[27] Ibid: 80f.
[28] End of section 1 ibid: 167
[29] Ibid: 38f.
[30] Final words of novel, ibid: 371
[31] Ibid: 36
[32] ibid: 356 – 357
[33] ibid: 341 again
[34] ib8d: 166f
[35] ibid: 178f.
[36] Ibid: 303
[37] See: Rayshard Brooks: Democrats call for police reform after latest killing | US policing | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/14/rayshard-brooks-police-killing-unrest-democrats
[38] see the Prologue in Hunter [2025] op. cit: 3 and compare to ibid: 350f.
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