Latest news with #AGirlIsaHalf-FormedThing
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The City Changes its Face by Eimear McBride review – romantic friction from the new bohemians
In literary terms, Britain was a duller place 15 years ago: Booker judges looked for novels that 'zip along', editors were saying no to Deborah Levy and the publisher Jacques Testard couldn't get a job. There was nothing for it but DIY: new houses, like Testard's Fitzcarraldo Editions, and new prizes for new authors shut out by the risk-averse mentality that prevailed after the 2008 recession. Leading the way was Liverpool-born, Ireland-raised writer Eimear McBride, whose 2013 debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, a looping soliloquy published by Norwich startup Galley Beggar Press, won the inaugural Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction as well as the Women's prize (then known as the Baileys), traditionally a more commercial award, in a sign that the thirst for novelty perhaps wasn't so niche after all. McBride's new novel, The City Changes Its Face, is a stand-alone sequel to her second book, 2016's The Lesser Bohemians, which was told by teenage drama student Eily, who comes to London from Ireland in the mid-90s and falls for Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, with an estranged daughter Eily's age, living overseas after her mother couldn't hack Stephen sleeping around – a snag for Eily, too. The action resumes here in 1995, yo-yoing between the recent past – in particular, a momentous visit by said daughter, Grace – and a narrative here and now in which Eily hasn't been leaving the house after a breakdown and Stephen is in a West End show, kissing his female co-lead on stage, something Eily's sort-of not-quite OK with. McBride's cutting between time frames repeatedly leaves us poised on one ticklish moment only to switch to another – whether Stephen has returned from work to find Eily and Grace drunkenly quizzing each other, or he's just been left bloodied by a shattered jar of piccalilli during a row with Eily at home, where innocuous-sounding exchanges about sandwiches and tea can't mask the volcanic undertow bubbling up from the individual miseries of their past (addiction, abuse, self-harm). What unfolds is a two-for-one trauma plot involving love between bruised souls who aren't walking on eggshells so much as tiptoeing blindfold across a tripwired minefield. This being McBride, it's the telling that's as important as the story; in seeking to portray what it's like to live in a body and a mind, she operates at a frequency most novelists ignore, intuitively able to recognise how something so apparently insignificant as the position of type on a page – indentation, spacing, line breaks – can be pressed into communicating nuances of thought and emotion. And as in The Lesser Bohemians, frequent interruptions in a tiny font are deployed to show Eily quibbling with herself (there are more conventional tools for that, but McBride fights shy of commas and speech marks, never mind brackets). The novel's drama lies ultimately in the dance of Eily's thoughts as she decodes Stephen's words, calibrates her own, watching his gestures, craving, ultimately, for the validation she finds in his desire. Anything that makes that place harder to reach, whether Grace's arrival or his refusal to ignore the marks on Eily's wrists, fuels tension. For Eily, Stephen's solicitousness for his daughter represents a threat, even though she likes Grace, who likes her too. The novel is most alive in that humanly messy tangle of almost unaccountable selfishness and anger, not least when her hopes of getting back into bed with Stephen – who is plagued by anxieties of his own – are stymied by Grace throwing up after one too many whiskies with Eily in the pub. While it's not period fiction – there are mentions of Kwik Save and the bookseller Samuel French but not John Major or Britpop – there's an elegiac quality to the still-ungentrified dossiness of its north London setting, where any problem can be eased for a time by the discovery of a forgotten four-pack, a cadged ciggie or nipping out for chips. And while the end of the book leaves us hanging, true, the ceaseless friction to its central relationship means it carries far more oomph than McBride's previous novel, 2020's unsatisfyingly wafty Strange Hotel. You sense that in revisiting The Lesser Bohemians she's continuing a project that's far from done, and this reader, at least, would be glad if she decides the life of Eily is the place to be. The City Changes its Face by Eimear McBride is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride review – brilliantly rule-breaking fiction
Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language. The subject matter of her fiction, from A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing onwards, is transgressive. In 2016's The Lesser Bohemians and in this new novel, not so much a sequel as a variation, she writes about incestuous child abuse, self-harm, suicide, heroin addiction, a miscarriage deliberately induced by rough penetrative sex, and about lots and lots of other sex between a couple whose ages (she's not yet 20, he's nearly 40) are likely to give modern readers pause. But what is most startling about McBride's work is not its dark material, but the way she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it. The City Changes Its Face has a doubled and entwined time scheme. It is the 1990s, north London, an area dirtier and poorer than it is now; we begin two years after The Lesser Bohemians left off. The lovers of that novel, Eily, the teenage drama student, and Stephen, the established actor with a traumatic past, have been living together. Something awful has happened. In the sections headed Now they are having an agonised conversation about that event. They move from pleas and accusations to a row, then to a thrown jar of piccalilli and bloodshed, followed by penitence and confessions and, at last, a reconciliation. This book-long conversation is interspersed with retrospective sections – headed First Summer, Second Winter and so on – in which we are shown, in scattered episodes, how they arrived at this point. As the two narratives converge on the awful event, its nature is gradually revealed. The event is easily guessed, but there is more to it, the final twist having as much to do with McBride's narrative form as it does with her story. It's a complex structure, skilfully controlled. About halfway through, it is interrupted by a movie. The book gives us access to Eily's interior self; not so with Stephen. In The Lesser Bohemians, McBride got inside his mind with a long passage of reported speech. In the new novel, she manages more adroitly. Stephen has made an autobiographical film. He shows it to Eily and his adolescent daughter (whose return after years of estrangement is an important strand of the plot). Eily describes it shot by shot. While much of the novel reads like a script – lots of dialogue – this section, paradoxically, does not. Eily, putting what she sees on screen into words, merges colour with sound, light with pace, always alive to the shift of a camera angle, to the way music accentuates mood. It's a bravura piece of descriptive writing. An inventive framework, then, but McBride's originality is most striking in the way she handles words. She uses verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives. On a hot day 'the boil outside makes sloth of in here'; on a cold one, a caress is 'a skate of chill hands'. Stephen's damaging history is 'the past's thwart of your now'. McBride coins new words: 'blindling' for blindly stumbling. She gives familiar ones new cogency by misplacing them: 'all his vaunt's gone'. She is playful, planting puns and submerged quotations in the stream of Eily's consciousness. And then she will spin a line in which grubby imagery is rendered lyrical by rhythm: 'Down where the foxes eat KFC, and night drunks piss, and morning deliveries will bleep us headachely up from dreams.' Eily's sentences end abruptly with no regard for syntax. If a fragment is sufficient to convey a mood, then why plod on to completion? Punctuation is wayward. Word order is unorthodox enough to make some passages read like prose translated directly from the German. The tone shifts between Eily's whirling inner thoughts and the banality of everyday chat. And there is yet another voice, printed in a smaller font, the still, small voice of that part of Eily that whisperingly tells her (and us) when she is deluding herself. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion This novel, with the city in its title, is at its most lyrical not in love scenes but in cityscapes. McBride's characters are often cold, often rain-soaked, just occasionally getting sunburned on Hampstead Heath. Weather is important, because to venture into public space is perilous but necessary. A dream sequence conjures up the sensation of flying, not by soaring high in the blue but by adopting the point of view of a camera strapped to the underside of a pickup truck swaying down the Holloway Road. Within this teeming urban setting, though, the characters are isolated. Sometimes this means happiness: 'We were an atoll of our own.' Often it means confinement. A dark bedsit, where lovers squeeze themselves into a single bed. A shared flat whose uncurtained windows look on to an elevated walkway – nothing green in sight. McBride celebrates the city, its sadness and grunginess and grandeur. London, she writes, 'serves itself', indifferent to its inhabitants, 'unceasing in its ever on'. This is classic European modernism – McBride salutes Dostoevsky, Proust, Tarkovsky, Kundera – but it has been remade in the service of intimacy. Eily, lustful at an inappropriate moment, reflects 'what a great thing it is that thinking is private'. McBride, ignoring linguistic convention to bring us up close to her character, allows us the illusion that that privacy can be breached. The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
