Canadian Writers Abroad

Emma Knight, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Viking 2025.
Reviewed by Eleanor Proudfoot

In Emma Knight’s The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus (Viking, 2025), we mainly follow Pen, and sometimes her friend Alice, both Canadian students attending the University of Edinburgh. Pen (short for Penelope) reaches out to her father’s old school friend (detective fiction writer Lord Elliot Lennox) in an attempt to discover the cause of the historic rift in their friendship. 

The mystery, the setting of the university, and of Scotland itself, seem to play second fiddle to what the book is truly about. The book is a love letter to the British upper-classes without any understanding of the complexities, or the problems, that go along with portraying the “aristos” of Britain. For instance, Knight has Pen take a series of baths while visiting the Lennoxes. How many country piles must you visit to know that you can’t just casually take a long hot bath in the middle of the day? Not without coming across as quite rude, at the very least. It’d be too drafty for the bath to stay hot for very long and the boiler might not even be able to handle it. 

Frankly, Scotland felt like a Brigadoon-esque backdrop from which the author could play out her Balmoral fantasies, rather than a true country. For example, the descriptions of the students making their way to and from their classes through Edinburgh read like a list of directions. I did not “feel” the city at all. 

Moreover, how can you set your novel at a school where there have been articles written about class issues, the isolation of working class students, and the lack of representation within the university, and not even bother to tangentially address this? We have one character in the friend group who’s not posh. Passing reference is made to this fact. That’s it. How can you make every single one of your main characters rich (rich enough that Pen grew up horseback riding in Toronto), and the best you can do is cram in the fact that Pen feels empathy for a homeless person in the biting Canadian cold? Don’t just tell us that our protagonist has a “throbbing awareness of her own privilege” and then have her fall in love with a member of the aristocracy and trail that whole family for the rest of the novel like Brideshead Revisited without the nostalgia. Because in a case like that, where what you show and what you tell contradict each other, the reader will go with what you show. 

I wanted to love this book. I really did. It has some great zingy dialogue, an interesting-enough plot, but once I noticed what was missing, the lack of reflection on the subject of class grew and grew, and every additional moment where Tatler was mentioned, where we’re told the villagers “need” the big house of the aristos, “need” the structure Christina brought, felt like a spectre rippling under the surface of the novel, needing to be acknowledged. As someone who lived in and loved the country in which the novel was set, a country in which nearly one in four children are in poverty, a country with many proudly virulent anti-monarchists, this rose-tinted view of characters who brush elbows with the royals felt objectionably out of touch. Where’s my antisyzygy?!

The strongest sections were set in Canada, or referred back to Canada. Pen’s memories of Toronto winter felt true, embodied, such as the breaking of the crème brulee crust reminding her of cracking puddles in November as a child. This kind of writing is what was missing from the sections set in Scotland.

There were also wise moments of characterization, such as this line from when Pen has dinner with her father: “he knew how to wield silence. She was too young, still, to know how not to fill it.” We even get to see Pen learn how to wield silence by the end of the novel, a clever choice that was in keeping with the rest of her growth as a character. 

The writing itself is fantastic, and the portrayal of emotions of teenage romance extremely realistic. The awkwardness, the tenderness, the hours of chatting on MSN will feel familiar to many readers. Knight’s choice of frequent POV jumps into even minor secondary characters’ thoughts, although sometimes a bit jarring, was definitely intentional, and harks back to Pen’s childhood idea of the selective omniscience of the dead. This level of attention to detail when it comes to small writing choices did give the novel extra weight.

And then we come to the confusing choice of the title. It refers to a conversation between Pen and Margot on octopuses (as a metaphor for motherhood). This was an interesting section, and the book does bring up some compelling and still very relevant reflections on motherhood, such as whether refusing to sacrifice yourself for your child would make you a monster. Our central story is also bookended by sections written from the perspective of an anonymous mother.

The closing section had some powerful writing: “Here, in our quiet corner where the tenses merge, we are snug.” Knight successfully shows us the timelessness of the experience of motherhood, the animal nature of it, tying it into the title while also making us understand that we do not need to figure out who this mother is. It is all mothers. To be able to signal this in just one line proves Knight’s strength as a writer.

Because of the choice to begin and end the novel with the sensorially overwhelming, emotionally deep passages on motherhood, I expected the theme to be woven into the core of the story, but I did not see the through-line. Instead, we have the story of two naïve young women in their first year of uni, and a smattering of examples of various mothers in the form of various secondary characters. The sections on motherhood felt pasted on top of the narrative after the fact. I can’t help but think how much stronger the novel would have been had a section been devoted to Pen’s mother, who did grow up working class. Her experience could have brought much needed texture in the form a different perspective, and could have tied together the themes of motherhood and class. 

The book I read is surely not the same one that was read for the Giller prize. The book I read was a tartan-romance masquerading as lit-fic. 

Emma Knight attended the University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Vogue, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus and The New York Times. She co-hosted and created the podcast Fanfare. As well as being the author of her debut bestseller, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, she is the co-founder of Canadian beverage company Greenhouse. She and co-author Christine Flynn published How to Eat With One Hand, a cookbook and essay collection for new and expectant parents. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters.

Eleanor Proudfoot works in Ottawa as a Business Development Advisor. She lived in Scotland for seven years, where she attended the universities of St Andrews and Napier.

Further

• Read with Jenna.
• “The Octopus Metaphor at the Heart of Emma Knight’s novel about motherhood,” Knight in conversation with Mattea Roach, CBC (February 5, 2025).
• Penguin Random House Canada for books by Knight.
• The Giller Prize 2025.
• Emma Knight, “The Shape of a Story: On Losing (and Finding) the Plot of Your Novel.” Literary Hub (January 23, 2025.