K ae Tempest’s new novel is dedicated to “you”, the reader. It also comes with a plea: “Be gentle though.” But to whom or what should we be gentle? The book or the writer? Having Spent Life Seeking is Tempest’s second novel, arriving a decade after his first and following a period of considerable personal change, including gender transition. Perhaps inevitably, it is a book full of struggle and soul-searching. It is also painfully earnest: an enervating read with an exhausting intensity that neither relents nor resolves. The publisher hasn’t helped here, bombastically announcing it as a “heart-breaking, soul-building new novel”. That’s a great deal to live up to, even for someone who established a reputation first as a blazingly fervent spoken-word poetry performer, winning the Ted Hughes award in 2013, and making Mercury prize-nominated albums in 2014 and 2017.…