Meet the innovator
Eimear McBride’s prose takes the reader on a wild ride of transposed thoughts and invented words.
The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride’s second novel, is reminiscent of Jack Kerouac in style and The Unbearable Lightness of Being in story – and is as good as both. A bold claim, but her fresh creative style classifies McBride as an innovator. Lines such as “My eyes curbing upstream to well beyond the balance of body. Far as stars I see and let the world go sway” challenge you to concentrate while forcing you to abandon control and just absorb the texture of the words.
Two tortured souls lead us through mid-90s London. Eily is an 18-year-old drama student who has left Ireland to attend a theatre course. She is younger and more naive than her peers. Stephen, an actor in his late thirties, is somewhat successful, but still lives in a bedsit. The uncomfortable age difference is diluted because the older rake character still behaves like a teenager.
Their relationship is initially purely sexual and neither expects it to continue – they don’t deny their differences or their common dysfunction. But love prevails.
The interior monologue effortlessly puts you inside the young woman’s head. This access to the inner workings of the character gives a unique, at times visceral, perspective.
McBride has developed a character so clear and strong that Eily’s recovery from abuse, through a relationship with a man with a daughter her age, is not predictable or concerning, but deep and believable. Even though her life is filled with bad choices, you never feel she’s out of control. And at every turn, the story and the characters’ places in it are perfect.
The author told America’s National Public Radio that she wanted to “look at someone who felt themselves to be a failed human being, and to see if there was a way for them to go forward”. As Eily and Stephen progress on their life journey, there are complicated friendships, coming-of-age experiences and shared horrors culminating in a perfect – if not happy – ending.
McBride’s invented words intensify the experience: “Enslithered by pints”, for example – that queasy beery feeling where you’re slipping from sobriety. The prose is filled with layered meaning, allowing us to see in Eily the complexities of being both vulnerable and indestructible: “Staggering brothellyhaired outside. In the mucklight, the starlight we are on the town.”
This book should be celebrated for challenging the norms. It invites re-reading just to experience the feel of the words again.