Book review:  The real and imagined horrors of renting during a housing crisis

It sounds like a good idea: a novel based on the nightmare that is renting a flat, mixed with a modern ghost story as experienced by a witty, sharply-observant young Irish woman, Áine.

The story is told totally from Áine’s point of view. It’s January and she’s flat-hunting with her English boyfriend, Elliott. 

They have not lived together before, but both were in flat-shares that were coming to an end. Elliott had tired of his all-male flat with “rotating tenants”.

When Áine visited, they were “constantly in a state of vigilance and overpoliteness, negotiating nights in with stolen Netflix passwords which didn’t violate the shared living-room politics. Playing house in preparation for living house.”

Áine’s flatmate, Laura, her best friend from university, had announced back in November that she was buying a houseboat with her American boyfriend Alex in order to get on the property ladder. 

She had met Alex on the dating app Tinder “(bio: socially liberal, fiscally conservative; job: sustainable vegan meal kit start-up)”.

As the novel opens, Áine and Elliott are on their 10th viewing, a place that is affordable presumably because it is not on the tube, but only accessible by train or bus.

This is how we learn that the action is taking place in London, even though there are no more place names nor landmarks mentioned. 

It turns out to be an affluent neighbourhood, with a “boujie” pub, expensive bakeries, and organic food shops.

The estate agent meets them on the street but doesn’t introduce himself. “Estate agents were invariably juvenile cokeheads with acne and hangovers and polyester suits.” 

The front door opens with “a loud, comical creak”, but neither of these things were “red flags”; Both Áine and Elliott had seen much worse in their time.

The apartment stank of stale cigarettes and bleach and something else, something “sour and vague she couldn’t put her finger on”. 

There are three rooms, and a kitchen door leading to a garden.

Another door leads to an unlit “downstairs basement” inspected by Elliott with his iPhone. 

Áine refuses to investigate: “It smelled like something had crawled down the rickety stairs and died. The damp, even from the other side of the room, caught on the back of her throat.”

Later, watching from the pub across the road, Áine sees a scowling, sinister-looking man emerging from the front door shared with the flat upstairs, wearing a dark leather coat that comes down to his ankles.

Nevertheless, they take the flat for 12 months, marvelling at their luck. So it would seem we are all set for a modern ghost story oozing with malignancy and Gothic scenarios.

But there is no ghost story, and very little plot. Instead we get a detailed account of a difficult year in Áine’s life in which she matures from confused adolescent to a more grounded young woman. 

The damp flat propels Áine into a minor breakdown, from which she recovers before she is entirely overwhelmed. Even the ever-cheerful Elliott sinks into a temporary depression.

There are two excruciating dinner parties, one hosted by Laura at which Elliott gets horribly drunk, while Áine ends up vomiting into the kitchen sink at hers.

A predatory friend from university, Cian, seduces Áine while Elliott is away at a stag party.

Her close friendship with Laura does not survive, and her resentment of Laura’s more middle-class background becomes clear. 

Elliott realises that Áine is not the person he thought she was, while Áine revises her opinion of her hard-working parents and their modest two-up, two-down in Enniskillen. 

After her usual Christmas back there, she returns to London to try again.