Lyrical story of addiction, abuse
Is there anything more sweet or sorrowful than being 18 years old, new to a big city, recklessly tipsy and in love for the first time? Irish writer Eimear McBride’s much-awaited new novel, The Lesser Bohemians, begins with this premise and uses it to plumb the depths of human experience. McBride’s writing pulls the reader into a drunken dream world of sexual discovery that’s as magical as it is haunted, her fearless voice tearing through the pretenses of society and uncovering the damage that lurks below.
McBride exploded onto the international literary scene in 2013 with her weird and wonderful debut, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. The book was written in her late 20s and rejected for almost a decade, until a start-up press, Galley Beggar, took a chance on it. Girl, of course, went on to introduce the world to McBride’s intensely experimental, poetic prose, earning her comparisons to literary giants such as James Joyce, and widespread praise — The Guardian called Girl “an instant classic” — plus a collection of prestigious awards, including the Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction.
The weight of all this expectation is piled onto The Lesser Bohemians, which apparently took nine years to write. And McBride does not disappoint, neither in courage nor in content.
The novel finds an Irish girl Eilis, or “Eily,” arriving in London in 1994 to attend drama school. A vulnerable, insecure virgin, she meets Stephen, a charismatic, promiscuous, semifamous actor twenty years her senior, in a bar, and the two embark on an affair. As their relationship progresses, mainly over tea, talk and sex in his dilapidated bedsit, Eily is forced to confront his ravaged past.
It’s difficult to overstate just how unsettling this book is to read. There is, in the opening chapters, the challenge of a narrative-hungry reader grappling with McBride’s stream-of-consciousness style. But then, later on, it is the harrowing themes that throw up blocks, the portraits of severe addiction and sexual abuse that emerge, the deep dysfunction, the hopeless destruction of it all.
But this is a book that rewards its reader, almost beyond comprehension. A book that has a stubborn, even compulsive need to find a sense of joy amid the suffering, to coax meaning from chaos. A book of strange power and insight that, in the end, really must not be missed. Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.