MAY-DECEMBER ROMANCE
EIMEAR MCBRIDE’S SECOND NOVEL INTRODUCES DAMAGED LOVERS IN 1990'S LONDON
Here it is: the perilous second novel. Irish writer Eimear McBride set the stage for comparisons by winning the Baileys Women’s Prize for her first ( A Girl Is a Half- formed Thing) and walking away with an armful of hyperbolic praise for her beautiful broken prose. Those who couldn’t get enough of her first book will want more and she risks disappointing them if she doesn’t deliver with The Lesser Bohemians. But if she does deliver, those who simply didn’t ‘ get’ the first book at all – for its language required deep engagement – will consign her forever to the Beckett and Joyce camp of books they deem inaccessible.
I doubt McBride, who has described writing as “probably the closest you can get to joy in life,” considered any of the above when writing her second book.
The novel’s premise is beautifully simple and rock-solid. A young Irish girl named Eily, hopeful, naïve, anxious, brave and funny – and desperate to fit in – arrives in 1990’s London and enrolls in acting school. Entering a milieu of pubs and parties where “the rule when offered is to partake,” she can’t wait to lose “the body’s stops,” find “a moderner me” and, yes, get shagged. She meets and falls for an older man, a seasoned actor, experienced, quiet, sexy, kind and funny, too – but damaged. And really that’s all we need. McBride’s writing is so strong and convincing that she had me in thrall from the start: from the first stirrings of attraction, tender honest and awkward, to the raw passion that ensues, to the disastrous doubts, anxieties, missteps and defensive ploys, to the final and wholly satisfying realization of profound love and trust. McBride never puts a foot wrong, manipulating language to trap us in Eily’s consciousness and experience for ourselves the tumult of first love.
Her prose, so notably chaotic, is in fact a precision tool. That the Irish are terminally gifted with language has long been apparent, and McBride is no exception. For some novelists, language is merely the track on which the wheels of the story are set in motion. It’s a garnish for others, dressing up the content. But for McBride, language is paramount. It’s her – and by extension our – direct conduit to the world, exterior and interior. It’s red- hot, live in each direction, connecting us with the high voltage of both perception and response. McBride doesn’t simply invite us to enter her narrator’s mind; she challenges us to withstand the shock of her emotions.
Not many writers carry off this trick. Miranda July and Emma Donaghue, with vastly different material, have achieved it, James Kelman too. James Joyce, McBride’s self- acknowledged influ- ence, set the bar. It takes a poet’s instinct to capture a fleeting scene in its entirety: action, reaction, emotional landscape, memories evoked, fears aroused, aesthetic quality, all of it. Everyday language is not up to the task.
The limitations of language probably account for most of the unintentionally comic sex scenes in literature. Conversely, the compression, concision, and reach of McBride’s language account for the utter authenticity of all the diverse conjoining that goes on between the lovers in The Lesser Bohemians. The detailed and protracted rendition of the narrator’s longed-for loss of virginity is honest, true and raw.
Entirely without cliché or coyness, it avoids both the vulgar and the comic. The interior monologue focuses on the emotional vulnerability and turbulence that accompanies the act, rather than on the anatomy. More impressive, the many beddings that quickly ensue are rendered in similar detail, engaging us only more deeply as we witness, and seem to collaborate in, the time- lapse evolution of a relationship, from one night stand to love.
All the more strange, then, that halfway through the book McBride chooses to lay down her tools and pick up a different set, a conventional hammer and nails to laboriously construct a back story for the lover and then – worse – have him recount it to the narrator blow by blow, in logical sequence (which almost never happens when we talk to those closest to us). It feels contrived. The lover’s voice feels inauthentic, and the sensational secrets he reveals remain, to me at least, unconvincing. To be fair, I could see what McBride was aiming for, but the outcome is unhappy. No-one wants to watch the writer at work.
Thankfully this long second half is relieved by some passages that return the passion and the power of the first. But in abandoning her narrator’s interior monologue McBride sabotaged her book’s potential, diffusing the impact of Eily’s story and weakening its overall drive. A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing derived its force from its integrity – perfect union of form and content, single vision, drive and focus – while The Lesser Bohemians interrupts itself. I wanted to turn back the clock and have McBride heed Russell Hoban’s much quoted observation: “A story is what remains when you leave out most of the action.” The real story of The Lesser Bohemians is the disparity in age and experience between the lovers. That they are both previously damaged adds to the precariousness of their situation, but we really don’t need to know the details. Just watching what happens between these two and how they negotiate the uneven ground is riveting. And it’s McBride’s prodigious talent that keeps attention pinned to the page.
MCBRIDE'S LANGAUAGE IS RED-HOT, THE HIGH VOLTAGE OF BOTH PERCEPTION AND RESPONSE