A Sense of Occasion: A Book I’m Still Not Entirely Comfortable Recommending

I finished A Sense of Occasion by Brodie Crellin three days ago, and I’m still deciding who I would hand it to. Usually that part comes easily. Working in a library gives you the mildly irritating habit of mentally matching books with people, often while those people are trying to tell you something unrelated. This time, I have a recommendation. It just comes with a conversation.

Crellin’s debut brings a fractured family together in a small English village after Mary’s sudden death. Her daughter, Patch, is trying to organize the wake. Robin, Patch’s father and Mary’s former partner, wants to be supportive but is rather easily diverted by his own needs. Meanwhile, Patch’s estranged cousin Jude is coming from Naples without telling the family to expect her. There is already enough to manage without a surprise arrival. Jude apparently feels otherwise.

The novel moves among their perspectives, with flashbacks filling in the relationships behind the funeral preparations. This matters because each person’s account of the family is necessarily incomplete. We spend time inside their explanations, then have to make room for someone else’s. I found that more interesting than choosing a character to agree with, although it does mean spending a considerable amount of time in uncomfortable company.

Robin is a particularly good example of what Crellin does well. In one passage, he drives through the countryside, hears a sad song, and begins to cry. The word attached to his crying is “dutifully.” That small choice changes the scene: his grief is real, but he also seems pleased to be having an appropriately moving experience. Nearby, he reassures himself that he is a careful driver despite his speed and the alcohol he has consumed. Crellin lets his self-description sit beside the evidence against it. There’s no need to underline the joke.

I found that mixture of vulnerability and self-deception more compelling than simple nastiness. Robin wants reassurance. That is understandable. His daughter also needs him, which makes his preoccupation with getting reassurance for himself rather less endearing. I could feel sympathy for him without being persuaded by his account of his own behavior. Those were the moments when I felt most securely in the hands of a good writer.

The more difficult part to recommend is the sexual material. It is explicit, and the relationship between cousins Jude and Patch carries an erotic charge bound up with possessiveness and control. This is central to the book, not a stray scene someone could skip without changing the experience. Describing it only as a funny novel about a dysfunctional family would leave out something a prospective reader deserves to know.

My reservation isn’t that fiction should keep its characters within acceptable boundaries. That would eliminate several very good shelves. It’s that crossing a boundary doesn’t automatically make a scene revealing. I could understand the interest in taking these relationships somewhere disturbing, but I wasn’t always convinced that the provocation added as much as the more precise observations of ordinary selfishness. Sometimes I wanted less escalation and more room to sit with what was already painful.

The family’s readiness to analyze one another also sent my thoughts somewhere quieter: to how easily familiarity can feel like complete knowledge. That was my own association, rather than a lesson I think the novel sets out to teach. At the library, people occasionally return books belonging to someone who has died. They might tell me, “She loved these,” or, “He never finished this one.” I’m always conscious of how little those books can tell me, and how much they might mean to the person putting them on the desk.

A mystery with a bookmark halfway through is still just a mystery with a bookmark halfway through. But someone remembers the chair it was read in, or the conversation they had about it, or the evening they meant to call. I try not to assume which. Reading this family made me think about that small act of restraint: allowing something about another person to remain unknown, even when you have plenty of evidence and a very confident explanation.

So yes, I would recommend A Sense of Occasion, particularly to readers who enjoy dark family fiction and don’t need affection for the characters to keep turning pages. I admired its attention to the excuses people make for themselves, and I had reservations about some of its methods. Both responses survived finishing it.

It won’t be my automatic answer when someone asks for a good book this week. But for the right reader, it might be the one we’re still discussing when they bring it back.