Book review: Fractured story delicately and expertly woven with sheer immersive greatness

I am very late to the party. Eimear McBride’s first novel,  A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, was launched in 2013 to a rapturous reception — having taken nine years to find a publisher. 

It went on to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the inaugural Goldsmith’s Prize for “fiction that expands the boundaries of the novel”.

In 2016, her novel The Lesser Bohemians was heaped with praise and carried off the long-established James Tait Black Memorial Prize. 

My curiosity was piqued, but then I read a synopsis that mentioned rainy Camden Town in 1996, a passionate sexual relationship between an ex-heroin addict turned actor and a drama student 20 years younger than him. 

I thought I’d wait until she wrote something more upbeat.

But how wrong I was — The City Changes Its Face is set in a run-down flat in Camden Town circa 1996, and features Stephen and Eily, the couple from The Lesser Bohemians once again, this time working through a crisis in their now two-year-long affair.

As a piece of writing it is absolutely in a class of its own, with an inventive and often witty prose style telling a complex story in a spell-binding way that has a rare physicality about it. 

There is, quite literally, never a dull moment.

You can feel the shudders as the London tube passing beneath makes the whole flat shake, the coldness of the greasy rain as it drenches coats and heads, and witness the utter dreadfulness of going through a heroin detox as a homeless outcast.

Such is the power of the writing that the often grim subject matter is no barrier to the reader’s enjoyment. 

One of the reasons we read fiction is to extend the boundaries of our empathy, and McBride’s writing certainly does that.

She ignores rules of grammar and syntax to vivid effect. Here is the street outside their window: 

“Bluish in the refrigeration light from below. Down where the foxes eat KFC, and night drunks piss, and where morning deliveries will bleep us headachely up from dreams.”

The story is told by Eily, in episodes. Early on there are hints of a traumatic event that has recently befallen the couple, but it is not fully revealed until the very last pages. 

The main narrative is under the headings ‘Now’. Other things happen in ‘First Winter’, ‘First Summer’, ‘Second Summer’, ‘This Autumn Gone’. 

The splintered narrative suits the splintered sentences.

There are unpredictable spaces in the sentences and between paragraphs, no quotation marks, and a smaller typeface to represent Eily’s innermost thoughts.

The ‘Now’ sections include the first visit of Stephen’s daughter, Grace, who is only two years younger than Eily. 

She grew up in Vancouver with her mother, who walked out on Stephen before she was born.

 The young women form their own alliance, each acknowledging their different relation to Stephen — lover, daughter.

“Then offered my smile to her facsimile of his and took what comfort came from her return of it.”

But Grace’s presence in the small flat has an inhibiting impact on the couple’s sex life.

Stephen is making a film about his years as an addict and his mother’s violent abuse. He takes the women to watch a rough cut in a Soho screening room. 

The film is recounted by Eily in a tour de force of almost 90 pages, encompassing both her description of the film’s scenes, her reactions to them, Grace’s reactions, and Stephen’s comments.

 To complicate matters even more, Stephen is played in the film by a young actor, Danny, himself a former lover of Eily.

It is like nothing you have ever read before. Anne Enright mentioned the word “genius”.

Treat yourself.