Irish writers

Colum McCann, Twist (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

Colum McCann said during the conversation I attended back in May that books are never completed until they are in the hands of readers who tell back what a book is about. This is essentially reception theory, which, referencing Wikipedia, says that readers interpret the meaning of what they read based on their individual cultural backgrounds and life experiences. In other words, “the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader”.

Although I don’t adhere to any theory absolutely, this makes some sense to me – as does my extrapolation from this that the reader’s background and life experiences contribute not only to the meaning they obtain from a work, but their assessment of it.

Colum McCann’s latest novel Twist was my reading group’s last book of the year. All of us were fascinated by its underlying story about the data – our data – travelling around the world via undersea cables, and the fragility or vulnerability of this data. But, when it came to assessing how much we liked the book, other things came into play, things that say as much about who we are as readers, what we look for in books, as they say about the book itself. For example, readers who look to empathise with appealing, rounded, human characters might assess Twist quite differently from those for whom ideas play a significant role in their preferences.

I’ll return to this, but first more on the novel. Twist is narrated by 50-something Irish novelist, Anthony Fennell, whose career had stalled. It “felt stagnant”, and he was feeling disconnected from life, “the world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward”. He was, in fact, “unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore”. He needed, he tells us, “a story about connection, about grace, about repair”. Fortuitously, into his lap falls an assignment to write a long feature about a cable repair vessel, which is led by a man called John Conway (whose name, we soon realise, contains allusions to Joseph Conrad and also perhaps to that other well-known JC).

So, in the first few pages of the novel, we know we are being told a story from after the event by a writer who was there as it happened. We know this event relates to Conway because Fennell tells us on the opening page that something had happened to him, and that he is going to tell his version of what happened as best he can, which might take some “liberties with the gaps”. Conway, then, is central to the narrative arc, but we also know that the subject matter is data and the internet, and that the theme will concern ideas like connection and disconnection, brokenness and repair, fact, fiction and the limits of storytelling. It’s impressive, in fact, just how much of the rest of the book is set up in the first couple of pages.

The narrative proper then starts. It’s January 2019, and Fennell meets Conway, and his partner Zanele, in Cape Town, before joining the Georges Lacointe on its journey up the western African coast to the site of a cable break. It takes some time to get there, so we get to know Conway a bit more. He is a good leader, and his multicultural crew of men respect him. The first and main cable break is repaired at the end of Part One, and then things go seriously awry. Zanele, who was performing in her unauthorised climate-change-focused version of Waiting for Godot in rural England, suffers an acid attack. Life starts to “unravel” for Conway who cannot get away to help her. Indeed, as the back cover says, Conway disappears.

I will leave the plot there. It does get more complicated, so I’ve not spoiled it I believe. I will return instead to my opening point about readers and their assessments. Most of those in my group who had reservations focused on the characters. Conway and Zanele were too shadowy; they were not well-rounded; we didn’t know them well. And, why choose a hard-to-identify-with man like Fennell as a narrator? I understand these questions but they don’t concern me, because I read the book differently – so let’s look at that.

Twist draws from, or was inspired by, two classic novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby, with its story of a man’s obsessive love for an unattainable woman, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness and its story about the darkness at the centre of colonialism. While the narrative arc clearly owes much to Fitzgerald, McCann said during the aforementioned conversation that Conrad’s novel provides the more obvious literary parallel. Those tubes along the seabed, he said, follow old colonial routes, and suggest corporate or digital colonialism.

“There is no logic. The world is messy.” (Fennell)

Looking at the novel through this perspective provides a way of understanding why McCann has written it the way he has. It is not about Conway and Zanele. We only see them through the eyes of Fennell. They are established enough to draw us in but their prime role is to support the ideas – disconnection, connection, turbulence, repair – rather than to be the subjects of the story. We know Fennell somewhat better, as we need to. He is a flawed man, stalled in life and feeling disconnected from it. It is his journey through the narrative that carries our hopes for repair.

If I had any criticism, it would more likely concern the writing. McCann’s is an exuberant, epigrammatic style. It’s not hard to see what he is doing, the games he is playing with meaning and metaphor. However, I can enjoy this sort of writing. It keeps ideas to the fore. And they were ideas that interest me – zeitgeist issues about the fragility of our data; the line between doubt/certainty, connection/disconnection (emotionally, spiritually, technologically), and break/repair; and the messiness of life. It’s not hard to find quotable quotes, like “opinion, the obscene certainty of our days” (p. 218) and “the disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface” (p. 25). I enjoy these too!

Part Two opens with:

It is, I suppose, the job of the teller to rearrange the scattered pieces of a story so that they conform to some sort of coherence. Between fact and fiction lie memory and imagination. Within memory and imagination lies our desire to capture at least some essence of the truth, which is, at best, messy.

By the end, McCann has told a story which illuminates the messiness of our time. The truth is that there is no real coherence. There is – and probably always has been – just all of us trying to muddle through the best way we can. This is not earth-shattering news, but McCann exposes some of the issues, many driven by technology, that affect our trying today. The light he throws on these – and the personal progress Fennell makes – are why I enjoyed reading this novel.

Colum McCann
Twist
London: Bloomsbury, 2025
239pp.
ISBN: 9781526656957

Author Talk: Twist with Colum McCann

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Like the recent Canberra Writers Festival author talk we attended with Helen Garner, last night’s event featuring Irish-born writer Colum McCann was a full-house. I have been wanting to read McCann for some time, but I hadn’t realised just how big a following he has.

The evening opened with a welcome and acknowledgement of country from Marie-Louise Ayres, Director-General of the National Library, who then introduced the participants:

  • Colum McCann: multi-award winning author of eight novels, three short story collections, and two works of non-fiction, and President and co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organisation, Narrative 4.
  • Nicole Abadee: writer, editor, podcaster, literary awards judge, and facilitator at writers’ festivals and other literary events.

The conversation

This was a conversation which went to the heart of how I perceive the world (if that doesn’t sound too grandiose), a way that is both optimistic but realistic, that simultaneously encompasses opposing truths. It also interested Mr Gums whose professional training was in telecommunications engineering. Interested? Then read on …

Nicole started by fleshing out Marie-Louise’s introduction of Colum. Yes, he was born in Dublin, but he has lived in New York City for over 20 years. She named two of his books that particularly interested her – Let the great world spin, which draws from Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk across the Twin Towers, and Apeirogon, which was inspired by the real-life friendship between Israeli Rami Elhanan, whose daughter was killed in a Hamas suicide bomb attack, and Palestinian Bassam Aramin, whose daughter was shot by an Israeli border guard. (This reminded me of Izzeldin Abuelaish’s memoir I shall not hate.) She described his newest novel, Twist, as “enigmatic and urgent”.

On storytelling

Nicole then added one more bit to Colum’s biography, the fact that in 1986, when he was 21, he cycled across the US from east to west, which is where, he has said, he learnt to listen. I have to add here that only a few years earlier, in 1982, my brother rode his bike across the US, but from west to east. Anyhow, Nicole used this additional piece of biography to lead into her first question: was this where he first learnt the value of storytelling?

Maybe, replied Colum, but it could have been at school, when he was 8. He praised teachers (and librarians) for being, with their promotion of books and reading, at the “frontline of democracy”. Also, his father was a journalist who encouraged writing and writers, including women writers like Edna O’Brien. (He told some delightful stories about his dad.)

But yes, the cycle ride was part of it. People would give him their story, and expect him to pass those stories on. This point led to a discussion of Narrative 4, and its Story Exchange Program, which he describes as “an act of radical empathy”. Its foundational concept is

“To step into the shoes of others in order to be able to step back into our own“.

It involves pairing two very different people, who share their own stories with each other, and then retell the other’s story as if it were their own. When kids do this, they are initially terrified of each other, but soon discover how similar they are, and “the barriers come tumbling down”. He asked the audience to try it then and there, and the buzz in the theatre was exhilarating.

On what Twist is about

The plot centres on the repair and sabotage of underwater cables. His inspiration was a story he read during COVID about the Léon Thévenin, a cable repair ship going out to fix Africa’s broken internet. A ship, he thought, isn’t the internet out there in the air? This inspired him to learn how the internet works. Everything we know is in those submarine cables/tubes but they are going to places we don’t know. He saw this story as a metaphor for, among other things, the idea that everything is both connected and disconnected.

These cables/tubes, which are owned by Google, Meta, Apple, etc, can be seen as digital colonialism. The tubes carry the data as light, which is both magical and biblical but also terrifying. More paradox.

From the reality perspective, these tubes are very easily damaged, and security (obvious to anyone’s eye) is “unbelievably slack”. It has, in fact, been suggested that the next major war will start under water. (Mr Gums whispered to me that China has announced that it has a cable-cutting ship.) Colum talked a little more about the very real risks and dangers involved here. We are talking about government – hospitals, education, and so on – about our lives which are tied to information and disinformation. This can be hard to write about, but he found it easy to write about in a novel. He used the tone of The Great Gatsby, and also referenced Heart of darkness. Twist has many illusions and allusions!

Colum then read p. 49 at Nicole’s request … a beautiful, rhythmic passage that sets the scene.

On Twist’s characters

Nicole suggested that the characters are also broken and need to be repaired. (All part of the metaphor.) Colum clarified straight off that his protagonist, Andrew Fennell, is not he. Fennell is a journalist in his mid-40s, and a failed novelist who thinks this story will be easy and may solve “his own ruptured cable”. He meets the boat’s Chief of Mission, John Conway (an allusion to Conrad, and with initials that carry other allusions!) They are all men, and are all at sea – literally and figuratively.

Somehow, Colum managed, throughout the conversation, to slip almost seamlessly between light and dark, without dragging us down. He believes we live “in fairly shattered times”, but admits we could point to many “end-times”: the pandemic (which is when he wrote this 2019-set novel), 9/11 (he was living in New York at the time), post WW2 and the fear of nuclear war, and more. BUT he sees now as different because it’s all moving so quickly we can’t easily repair it. He identified climate and global migration as two big issues.

However, he’s an optimist, so he believes repair is possible. He pointed to what Greta Thunberg achieved by standing up. She has done magical things, but it’s not enough. We need more voices like hers.

On The Great Gatsby parallels

Nicole was keen to explore the parallels with The Great Gatsby, but although that novel frames this one, Colum didn’t want to focus on that. He sees Heart of darkness as the more obvious literary parallel. The tubes, he says, follow old colonial routes, and suggest corporate or digital colonialism.

He then talked about writers and readers. The big secret about writers is that “we don’t know what we are doing”. Books are never completed until they are in the hands of readers who tell back what a book is about. As for whether his book contains truths, truth, he said, is the music in the background.

Returning to the overall connection-disconnection metaphor, he said we have never been more connected yet so alone. This is particularly acute for young people. The machine is not the problem, but our relationship to the machine. And here came the paradoxes again. Technology is also good. How do we hold these contradictory ideas. He alluded to Dickens – it’s the best of times and the worst of times (and can be “incredibly crushing”). How do we support our young people? Through education, books, parents.

These are big problems, but not insurmountable. This is where storytelling comes in, as used at Narrative 4. We are in real danger of losing books but we still have stories.

On writing and politics, as activism, as disruption

Colum recognises that writing doesn’t have to be political, but for him it is. It’s about disrupting conventional thinking. When asked what he wanted to disrupt with this book, he responded, “I don’t know”, and added that this was a “good answer”. He wished more people would say they don’t know.

This led to the idea of the “ethical imagination”, which includes being conscious about intruding on others’ stories. Cultural appropriation is completely valid, but you enter another’s story or domain “with head bowed” and come out again to do justice to the story. There’s cultural appropriation and cultural celebration: two opposing truths. How do we live with the messiness between two endpoints, which in themselves are absolutes and problematic. He was saying, as I understand it, that life/truth/ethics lie in managing the messiness between the endpoints. This thinking – this way of understanding our lives – greatly appeals to me.

Q & A

On Nabokov’s statement that “imagination is the purest form of insubordination”:

Colum liked this idea. Messy is where decency is, but America is not recognising the messiness. “Multitudinous is good”, but currently in the USA there’s denial that you can be (embrace) multitudes. Art needs to say life is complicated.

On whether fact and truth are the same thing: Colum illustrated this with a story about Apocalypse now, that he references in the novel. He described a scene from the film and behind-the-scenes of that scene. It demonstrated “two clear realities”. The filmed scene (the fictional reality, or invented scene) is what we all see and remember, while the real events that happened on set has got lost in the haze. This was a more sophisticated answer than I would have given. I like its refusal to be simple. He added that “facts are mercenary things”, things that are “used”, and don’t necessarily get to the truths.

Conclusion

Andra Putnis, the new Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival, closed the session.

A big thanks to local author Karen Viggers for passing on her ticket to me when she realised she would be out of town – in Bhutan, in fact! I am so glad I attended this conversation.

Author Talk: Twist with Colum McCann
With Nicole Abadee
National Library of Australia, in partnership with the Canberra Writers Festival
Friday 9 May 2025

Sebastian Barry, The secret scripture

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What follows here is an edited version of the first ever review post I wrote – back in December 2008 on a Blogger blog I set up for my reading group. I’ve been meaning for some time to bring it over here because I’d like to have Sebastian Barry represented on my blog! However, my review was written in a different style to the one I use now, so I’ve tried to update it a bit. This is difficult given it’s a long time since I read it! I apologise for its awkwardness.

I read The secret scripture because I’d heard great things about his previous novel, A long long way, which, like The secret scripture, was shortlisted for the Booker prize. The book is set in Ireland in contemporary times, with flashbacks to the 1930s, and is told through the voices of two characters: Roseanne, a centenarian who has lived in a mental hospital for over 50 years, and Dr Grene, a psychiatrist at the institution for 35 years. As Roseanne writes her life-story, which she hides under boards in her room, Dr Grene investigates the reasons for her being there with a view to deciding her future, because the hospital is slated for demolition. His understanding of her story and her own telling of it differ. What falls out is a tortured story of religion, family and politics at a time in Ireland when sides had to be taken, rules took precedence, and humanity was in short supply.

As he investigates Roseanne, Dr Grene, who is grieving over the death of his wife, Bet, spends a lot of time with Roseanne, and shares his own story with her.

“the assault of withering truth”

There was so much to like about the novel – the language, the characters (albeit most are loosely drawn), and the themes. I particularly liked Barry’s musings on “truth” and “history”, which is not new of course. I also liked the connection made between truth and health, that Roseanne’s “truth” was a healthy one.

Roseanne is intriguing as a narrator. I would call her reliable not because she tells us the correct facts necessarily (as it appears that she may not have) but because, as Grene says at the end, she tells us “her” truth and this truth “radiated health”. It may not hold up in a court of law but it gets to the heart of who Roseanne is. It is “vexing and worrying”, though, as Roseanne says, when different people’s truths (such as Fr Gaunt’s and Roseanne’s) cross each other. How true is (the perfectly named) Father Gaunt’s anyhow? His conveys the facts but contains no humanity, let alone empathy. He has no idea of who Roseanne is, but he does know the “law” (of the church at least).

“History, as far as I can see, is not the arrangement of what happens, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.” 

As those of you who know me might imagine, the exploration of truth was one of my favourite aspects of the book. In this novel it is so humanely nuanced, suggesting that we should look out for two truths – the facts and inner meaning – and decide which one should take precedence in any given situation. Facts, as we know only too well, are important but we should also heed the “hidden inner” truth as well. In relationships, for example, perhaps the “hidden inner” truth is equally if not more important. Why a person is saying or doing something, for example, may be more critical than what they are saying or doing.

Then there’s the language. It is beautiful, poetic. Poetic usually means two things to me, mostly in combination – language that is rich in imagery and that has a strong rhythm. Barry’s writing has wonderful rhythm, which he creates through the use of repetition, and particularly thought the careful use of punctuation, and long sentences interspersed with short sentences to give a lovely flow. This example near the opening almost reads like blank verse:

“That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood sway. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains.

There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animals, in floods.

The river also took the rubbish down to the sea, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled form the banks, and bodies too, if rarely, oh and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. The speed and depth of the river would have been a great friend to secrecy.

That is Sligo town I mean.”

He sets a powerful tone in these opening few paras – the rhythm is slow but with just an edge of awkwardness that catches you off guard. And the language conveys something untoward – “cold”, “dark”, “black”, “rubbish”, “secrecy”. These are not repeated but, used in combination in such a few concentrated paragraphs, they give a sense of the story to come. It’s an evocative opening and it engaged me quickly.

As for characters, Roseanne engaged me from the start; she always felt authentic. I wasn’t always so sure of Dr Grene. Did we need all the Bet stuff, albeit was moving? Perhaps, given the role of men in women’s lives, and in Roseanne’s in particular, we are meant to be on guard. However, he particularly started to lose me towards the end, when he started to more actively investigate Roseanne’s history. From a plot point of view it was logical and understandable, but the voice became more prosaic, ordinary, in some sense that seemed to lose Grene’s particularity.

My main issue with the book was, in fact, the ending. It was contrived. Maybe Dr Grene’s voice felt more forced towards the end because even Barry knew his plot resolution was a bit too neat and didn’t quite know how to do it! Fortunately, plots aren’t the main indicator for me of a good read.

Dr Grene’s choosing, in the last para, the bright and open rose rather than a uniform neat one, suggests an acceptance of being open to many truths, to the imperfections of the world, than to that tidy, dry version of the world that we get from Fr. Gaunt. This softens the neat plot conclusion somewhat – as does the fact that Barry doesn’t go in for the full cliched emotions that such a story might commonly close on. Consequently, despite some misgivings, I’d happily read more Barry because I loved the heart and openness in his exploration of truth, and his writing is so engaging.

Kimbofo also reviewed this way back when!

Sebastian Barry
The secret scripture
London: Faber and Faber, 2008
300pp.

William Trevor, The hill bachelors (#Review)

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Well, Kim (Reading Matters) and Cathy’s (746 Books) “A year with William Trevor” project is all but over, and I’ve only done one post – on the titular story in the little The dressmaker’s child collection. The second story, “The hill bachelors” (as in bachelors living in the hills), was first published in his collection titled The hill bachelors.

William Trevor (1928-2016), as most of you will know, is an Irish writer of novels and novellas, short stories and plays. He is particularly good at writing about marginalised people, or those who are loners or outsiders, and writes authentically about them, regardless of their age or gender. “The hill bachelors” is another of these, though perhaps more a variation on the theme. Is the protagonist Paulie marginalised? In a sense perhaps? Is he a loner or outsider? Again, it depends on how you see him, and the choices he makes.

Trevor is one of those writers who lets the reader work out who’s who, what’s what, as we go. The first two paragraphs of this story describe a 68-year-old woman, wearing mourning clothes, waiting for “them” who will decide her future. Very little is overtly explained, but by the end of the second paragraph, we know that she has worked hard and got on with whatever life has thrown at her – and, it seems, she will continue to do so with a calm resignation.

Then, we are introduced to a man we come to realise is her 29-year-old son, Paulie. He is coming for his father’s funeral/wake. He is the youngest of five children, and had not had a good relationship with his “hard” father. It soon becomes apparent that the mother expects the children to work out what will happen to her now – and what will happen to her now, as soon becomes apparent, is that Paulie will return to the family farm. After all, “he was the bachelor of the family”, and his job as a lorry driver “wasn’t much”. However, to do this he will have to give up the woman he loved as she is not interested in a farm life.

While he is working out his notice back in town, his mother is helped by neighbours, the bachelor Hartigan and his sister. It is this sister who introduces the idea of the hill bachelors. She suggests that Paulie would not want to come back because

“It’s bachelors that’s in the hills now. Like himself,” Miss Hartigan added, jerking her bony hand in the direction of the yard, where her brother was up on a ladder, fixing a gutter support.
“Paulie’s not married either, though.”
“That’s what I’m saying to you. What I’m saying is would he want to stop that way?”

Seeing bewilderment in Paulie’s mother’s face, she goes on to explain that “the bachelors of the hills found it difficult to attract a wife to the modest farms they inherited”.

And so Paulie comes back. He “harboured no resentment … it was not the end of the world”. What was “the end of the world”, however, was hearing the woman he loved say that life on a farm did not attract her. He works hard, and he starts dating local women, but Miss Hartigan seems to have known whereof she spoke.

The story is told third person, through the alternating perspectives of the mother and Paulie. We hear what the the rest of the family thinks, or has done, mostly through Paulie’s and his mother’s thoughts and assumptions, through their deep knowledge of how their family works and of the rural traditions within which they live. There is a little dialogue, but not much. Paulie and his mother are both “types” and yet quietly individualised too.

There’s no big drama in this story, just ordinary people making the decisions that seem right at the time. Paulie’s mother is not unkind or demanding. Indeed, she offers to move in with a married daughter, and, in a little revelatory moment, Trevor lets on that she’d shed some private tears in her early days on the farm. She would do her best to make it easy for a new wife, unlike her own experience. However, marriage to a man from the hills has taught her passivity, to do what she’s told, so she resigns herself – as we are led, from the opening paragraphs, to expect she’d do – to see out her lot. Paulie, too, seems resigned, like his mother, to play out the role set for him, even if it means joining the titular hill bachelors.

All this makes it a far more complex story than it might seem on the surface. It means that, as much as we’d like to, it’s hard to see Paulie as a victim, because he does have a choice, difficult though it may be. But the pull of tradition and responsibility is strong, and while Paulie is aware of what is happening to him, he is resigned to it. Ultimately, as he himself realises, “guilt” and “goodness” have nothing to do with it, it just is what it is, “enduring, unchanging” – and he is not going to buck it.

Trevor thus leaves it for us to think about – to think what the different choices might mean for his mother, for Paulie, and, more widely, for the rural way of life that, regardless of their decisions or their own thoughts about it, does seem to be on its way out. It is up to us readers to ponder the bigger picture, to wonder where that will get him, them or the farm. After all, if he doesn’t marry, what will happen? In continuing their rural traditions, will anything be ultimately achieved, or will this be another sad little life?

Cathy (746 Books) has reviewed the collection.

William Trevor
“The hill bachelors”
in William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child
London: Penguin Books, 2005
pp. 21-39
ISBN: 9780141022536
(First published in The hill bachelors, 2000)

Claire Keegan, So late in the day (#BookReview)

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In her final Novellas in November post, Cathy (746 Books) wrote about Claire Keegan’s short story “So late in the day”, and included an online link to the story. Having not read any of Keegan’s writing, to that point, and feeling the lack, I pounced – and was not disappointed.

“So late in the day” is a beautifully observed story told through the eyes of a man named Cathal. In it, he reflects on his relationship with a woman, Sabine, whom we come to realise is no longer around. Why? The story starts by encouraging us to empathise with him. His work colleagues seem worried about him, and his boss encourages him to go home early. The opening paragraph contains hints of things being a little awry or disturbed. It’s gloriously subtle. Every word carries weight, which makes the reading pure pleasure as you ponder just what the straightforward-sounding words and sentences are really signifying.

Life is clearly discombobulated for Cathal. For example, as he makes his way home, we are told:

For no particular reason, a part of him doubted whether the bus would come that day, but it soon came up Westland Row and pulled in, as usual.

The “for no particular reason” is telling, because there is a reason he feels uncertain, albeit we don’t know it yet, and his unawareness of why he feels this way is part of the issue.

So, the bus comes, and he finds himself sitting next to a woman who seems to want to talk. Hmm… he’s not happy. Soon, however, she turns to her book, The woman who walked into doors. Now, it’s a rare writer who inserts books into their stories randomly, but I didn’t know this book, so off I went to the internet and very quickly found that it is by Roddy Doyle. The Guardian quotes him on why he wrote this book which features a pre-existing character of his: “I had to give Paula a chance to explain why: why she married this man in the first place, and why she stayed with him.”

Gradually, then, the penny drops, but oh so slowly, because Keegan’s story is told from a man’s point of view, and this man is so woebegone, so clueless.

This is the sort of writing I like, writing that challenges the reader to work a bit, to read between the lines and not jump to simplistic responses. Cathal is an unreliable narrator. He does not see the whole truth, but Keegan draws out, from his own mouth, exactly what has happened, so that it all becomes clear to us, the reader, while he remains locked in his cluelessness.

There’s another challenge for the reader, though, besides sussing out what has happened, and it’s to do with how we feel. We start by feeling sympathy for him. He’s sad and lonely. But, as he talks about Sabine, a picture builds up. He is the more passive one in the relationship, but more than that, he is the taker. She organises the outings. She cooks, though he does grudgingly clean up, resenting the mess she makes. She’s generous, doesn’t “mind the cost” of nice food, spending “freely” at the markets, while he either tots up costs or, when he’s paying, makes mean choices. When he proposes to her, it’s devoid of romance. Is he emotionally repressed, and should we continue to feel for him, or is something else going on?

Quite late in the story, in a telling flashback, he remembers an occasion from his childhood. His brother had played a nasty trick at the dinner table on their nearly sixty-year-old mother, and instead of remonstrating with him the father joins the laughter. In this anecdote, and his reaction to it, we see the depth of his disconnect in how to relate to a woman, which adds to our growing awareness of an ungenerous, self-centredness in him. He doesn’t know how to give. There are occasional glimmers of awareness, but by the end, when we know exactly why he is so sad, why this day is so hard for him, we are left wondering what to think about him. Can he change? Or, more to the point, does he realise he needs to change? Does he fully comprehend the depth of his failure?

The French-translated title for this story is Misogynie, which makes no bones about its over-riding theme, but I like the subtlety, the multi-layered meanings behind “So late in the day”. To tease that out here, however, really would spoil the story for any of you wanting to read it.

Meanwhile, I’ll share this from early in the story. As Cathal is leaving work, we are told

He would ordinarily have taken out his mobile then, to check his messages, but found that he wasn’t ready—then wondered if anyone ever was ready for what was difficult.

Good question, but it doesn’t augur well for our narrator’s development does it?

An absolute gem of a story.

Claire (Word By Word) also liked it.

Claire Keegan
“So late in the day”
in The New Yorker, 28/2/2022

Available online at The New Yorker.

William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child (#Review)

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I knew, when Kim (Reading Matters) and Cathy (746 Books) announced their “A year with William Trevor” project, that I had a little book containing some William Trevor short stories but, could I find it? Nope. It was a little book after all. And then, voilà, just the other day while I was doing my book decluttering and packing, I came across it. It’s Pocket Penguin 22 from Penguin’s 70 Years celebration, and is called The dressmaker’s child, but it contains three short stories, so these will be my (very willing) contribution to the project. Two of the stories were chosen by the author from previous collections, but for the titular story this is its first appearance in book form.

Most of you will know of Trevor (1928-2016) but, in a nutshell, he’s an Irish writer of novels and novellas, short stories and plays. He won many literary awards in his life, and was particularly well regarded as a short story writer – making him right up my alley. In fact I have read one of his short stories before, early in this blog.

In her most recent Trevor review (of a novel titled The children of Dynmouth) kimbofo writes that it didn’t take her long to feel that she was in “familiar William Trevor turf in which he takes a seemingly ordinary character with eccentric traits and lets them loose in a confined setting”. This could apply to the short story, “The dressmaker’s child”, as it is about a young nineteen-year-old motor mechanic, Cahal, working for his father in a small town. He’s the only son in a family of girls – all of whom have left – and he is “scrawny” with a “long face usually unsmiling”. The story opens on him applying WD-40 “to the only bolt his spanner wouldn’t shift”, which sets a tone that perhaps other things are, or might be, locked up for our protagonist.

As he continues to work on the car, a young Spanish couple appears, wanting to be driven out to see the Sacred Virgin (Our Lady of Tears) who they believed – that is, they had been told so by a barman – would bless their marriage. Now Cahal knows the statue’s special spiritual status had been disproved and thus rejected by the church, but with a 50-euros job in the offing, he doesn’t actively dissuade them from their mission.

Trevor describes the trip, complete with hints of self-delusions, until on the way home Cahal’s car hits a child – the dressmaker’s child – who is known to run at cars and who, up till then at least, had never been hurt. With the Spanish couple kissing in the back of the car, and choosing avoidance over action, Cahal continues driving despite being aware of “something white lying” on the road behind him. Back in town, nothing is said about the dressmaker’s daughter for a few days, but Cahal remains uncertain. It affects his relationship with his young woman, and when the dressmaker herself starts to appear in town at his side, hinting that she knows what had happened, but is not reporting him, his fears and uncertainty increase.

This is not a thriller, but there is a plot and an ending (of course) so I will leave the story here. It’s nightmarish stuff, but very real too.

Trevor’s writing, his unfolding of story and character, is a pleasure to read. Take Cahal’s character, for example. From the stuck bolt (albeit does start to loosen, hinting at possibilities), he is depicted as rather gormless, bowling along, taking opportunities as they come without a lot of consideration – and somewhat different to his father who, during a conversation about the Swedish couple, shakes his head “as if he doubted his son, which he often did and usually with reason.”

This brings me to the point of the story which, as we are slowly brought to see, is the impact on Cahal of what he did or didn’t do – and the almost catatonic fear it engenders:

Continuing his familiar daily routine of repairs and servicing and answering the petrol bell, Cahal found himself unable to dismiss the connection between them that the dressmaker had made him aware of when she’d walked behind him in the night, and knew that the roots it came from spread and gathered strength and were nurtured, in himself, by fear. Cahal was afraid without knowing what he was afraid of, and when he tried to work this out he was bewildered. 

It changes his life – not in the way we might expect but in a way that shows with absolute clarity how avoidance and inaction can be as potent as anything else. Trevor, like my favourite short story writers, is less about drama and more about the complex realities of human interaction in which accommodations rather than simple resolutions are more often the go. I look forward to the next story.

William Trevor
“The dressmaker’s child”
in William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child
London: Penguin Books, 2005
pp. 1-20
ISBN: 9780141022536
(First published in The New Yorker magazine, October 4, 2004: available online)

Audrey Magee, The colony (#BookReview)

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Irish novelist Audrey Magee’s second novel, The colony, was my reading group’s August book, and it proved an excellent choice. Literary and highly readable, with vivid characters and a sophisticated exploration of its subject matter, The colony engaged us on all levels. It was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize (and may yet be shortlisted. We will know next week.)

The novel’s overall subject is, as the title implies, colonisation – and Magee teases out its personal, cultural and political ramifications through a small island colony off the west coast of the Republic of Ireland. The word colony, like much in this book, is multi-layered. The novel is set over the summer of 1979, easily dated for readers by reporting of the assassination of Louis Mountbatten in August 1979.

“the battle of the colonisers”

The colony is carefully structured, with chapters about what’s happening on the island alternated with reports of sectarian killings from the Troubles in the north. These reports are brief, stark, and devastating, and serve as a constant reminder of what colonisation can do. But these reports are just one of the layers in the novel, which starts with the arrival of the ambitious British artist Lloyd (whose name is not random. He has plenty of money!)

Lloyd is coming to the island to make his name. He is a modern colonialist in the way he assumes he can buy what he needs, and manipulate others, to achieve his goal. He promises, for example, to respect the islanders’ wishes that he not paint them, but this doesn’t last. The way Magee unfolds his role is clever and subtle, because the islanders, whose numbers have dwindled to twelve families, want and need his money to survive. His perspective is told through terse, poetic language.

Arriving soon after Lloyd is the French linguist, JP Masson. He has been visiting this Gaelic-speaking island for years, undertaking a longitudinal study of the island’s linguistic patterns for his PhD. JP is fierce about the need for the islanders’ language to preserved as is. He resents the infiltration of any English into the island, so Lloyd’s appearance is the last straw. It will, he believes, force a “sudden and violent ” shift to English, instead of the slow “linguistic evolution” to bilingualism that was under way:

The Irish here was almost pure, Lloyd, tainted only by the schoolchildren learning English, by the intermittent visits of emigrants returning from Boston and London with their sophisticated otherness, and by mercenaries in linguistic mediation, men like [islander] Micheál who want only to communicate, indifferent to the medium or its need for protection  …

JP’s perspective is told through the carefully thought prose of a writer, though when he is writing his paper on colonisation and language, I found it a bit heavy-handed, a bit too much of the telling not showing.

However, this issue of maintaining language – and its relationship to the colonial project – is intelligently explored. JP argues uncompromisingly for preserving the language, because it “carries their history, their thinking, their being”, and resists the fact that languages change. He rides roughshod over the islanders, insisting that they must use their language. Lloyd, on the other hand, wipes his hands of the issue, “not my concern” he says. Meanwhile, the islanders go about their business, continuing to speak their language with each other, while being willing to use English where it benefits them. They are no fools, for all JP’s exhortations:

What do you think, Micheál? said Masson. Are you less Irish when you speak English?
I don’t talk politics, Masson. You know that.
We’re talking about language, Micheál.
Same thing. 

Just this topic alone, and how Magee uses it to expose colonialism’s short, medium and long tail, could take up a whole review.

Throughout the novel, the islanders are caught in the middle, but maintain a healthy perspective:

Imagine that, said Mairéad. A Frenchman and an Englishman squabbling over our turf. 
They’ve been squabbling over our turf for centuries, said Francis. 

There is a wonderful, dry humour in this novel. And much of it comes from the islanders, who have their own way of dealing with things. But they, too, are not united. The matriarch, 89-year-old Bean Uí Fhloinn supports the old ways, and is a perfect subject for JP’s research, while her granddaughter Mairéad tends to be the voice of humane or sometimes just resigned reason. Her son James sees Lloyd as his way out. He doesn’t want to be a fisherman, as all the men before him have been (including his drowned father, grandfather and uncle). He shows real talent as an artist, and believes Lloyd’s promise to take him back to England at the end of summer.

And so, as summer progresses, tensions increase, between Lloyd and JP (who both come from colonising nations, for all JPs attempts to ignore his own complicated origins), but also between the islanders as they respond to what’s happening on the island and up north. They comment on the violence in the news reports. In one telling moment, Mairéad and her brother-in-law Francis discuss the Mountbatten assassination in which two teenage boys were also killed. For Mairéad this is wrong, whilst for Francis it’s “collateral damage”:

Where does this end, Francis?
In a united Ireland, Mairéad. One free of British rule.
And you’ll blow up innocent children to get it. Mairéad swallowed the last of her whiskey. You’re pathetic, Francis Gillan.

Violence is a constant presence in the book, from the relentless news reports to young James’ brutal killing of rabbits for food. Francis hangs over the novel ominously. What does he do on the mainland? What will he do to “get” Mairéad, for whom, she knows, he is “Waiting. In the long grass. Waiting for me to fall flat on my face so that he can pick me up and make me his.”

I am interested in this issue of violence and how it permeates society. It’s what I think Tsiolkas was on about in The slap (my review). When people are confronted with violence on a regular basis, how do they respond? How should they respond?

Another issue Magee explores is art. While Lloyd hides away, painting his magnum opus – which draws inspiration from Gauguin (another artist who worked in a colonial, exploitative environment) – the islanders discuss whether they should be worried. Is it “just” art, or something else?

James clearly understands that art has meaning, and recognises the message in Lloyd’s final painting:

It’s me as you want me to be seen, Mr Lloyd. As you want me to be interpreted.

It’s certainly not James as he wants to be seen. It’s a cruel scene, particularly given Lloyd’s earlier lofty dreams of showing “that art is greater than politics. Art as peacemaker, as bridge builder.”

Truly, The colony is, to use a favourite word of the islanders, a “grand” book. The writing is expressive, with various motifs running through it – like rabbits, apples, smells – and refrains, like “young widow island woman”. There are gorgeous descriptions of landscape and nature, and of daily life. There’s rhythmic variation, finely evoking different characters and tones. And there’s the shifting of perspectives, sometimes within paragraphs, which brought to mind Damon Galgut’s The promise (my review).

The colony recognises some of the fundamental ironies in the situation the islanders find themselves in. Both JP and Lloyd, who look like they might (or, at least could) do good, are ultimately there for their own aggrandisement. The little island colony, to which they come, functions then as a perfect microcosm of the colonised. With dwindling numbers, those remaining need to do what they can to survive, but the odds are stacked against them. It’s an all too common story, and Magee tells it skilfully, giving her novel an ending which makes its point without going for the high drama I half expected. It’s all the more powerful for that.

Coincidentally, Lisa and Jacqui (JacquiWine’sJournal) both reviewed this book last month, and both are worth reading.

Audrey Magee
The colony
London: Faber & Faber, 2022
376pp.
ISBN: 9780571367627 (Kindle ed.)

Maria Edgeworth, Leonora (#BookReview)

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My Jane Austen group decided to start the year by discussing one of Austen’s precursors, not to mention favourite writers, Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). Edgeworth was born eight years before Austen and lived much longer than Austen’s not quite 42 years – lucky her! She was also prolific, so we had plenty to choose from. According to Wikipedia, she was “during the period 1800–1814 (when Walter Scott‘s Waverley was published) … the most celebrated and successful living English novelist.” Australian academic Dale Spender supports this in her Mothers of the novel*, writing that:

If ever there was a period in the history of letters when women unquestionably led the way it was in the last quarter of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century when the only challenges to the pre-eminence of Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth came from other women – like Elizabeth Inchbald and Ann Radcliffe.

So, Edgeworth is well worth looking at, and my group gave it a good shot. Some books were read by more than one member, and some members read more than one book, but I was the only one to read Leonora. In case you are interested, here are the books we read:

  • Letters for literary ladies (1795)
  • Castle Rackrent (1800)
  • Belinda (1801)
  • Leonora (1806)
  • The absentee (part of Tales of a fashionable life) (1812)
  • Harrington (1817)
  • Helen (1834)

Now, Leonora …

Its plot is essentially this: kind, newly married, well-to-do Leonora invites to her English home, Olivia, who had been exiled to France because of her unconventional, shall we say, behaviour in marriage. This was a time when divorce was shocking and required “guilt”. Sensation-seeking Olivia’s ideas about marriage are romantic:

I married early, in the fond expectation of meeting a heart suited to my own. Cruelly disappointed, I found—merely a husband.

Poor Olivia!

Maria Edgeworth, LeonoraIn Leonora, Edgeworth leaves aside her Anglo-Irish themes for an English-French one. She pits English common-sense, through Lady Leonora guided by her mother the Duchess, against French “sensibility”,  through Olivia, an English woman who behaves like a French “coquette” under the guidance of her friend Gabrielle. The novel anticipates Jane Austen’s Sense and sensibility (1811), but while Marianne’s “sensibility” can be seen as teenage silliness and idealism, Olivia’s is self-centred, lacking in morality – and, unlike Marianne, she’s unlikely to change. The book critiques this sort of over-dramatic, over-blown behaviour, and makes a case for steady love based on early passion developing into deep respect and friendship!

Leonora, it must be said, does not exhibit the subtlety nor the realism that makes Austen so special. The characters tend to the black-and-white, and the discussion of sense versus sensibility lacks the nuance that Austen brings to it. Austen’s characters are more “rounded”, with sensible Elinor also capable of feeling, and emotional Marianne not being completely devoid of sense. In Leonora, sense and sensibility are presented very much as dichotomies, though Leonora is shown to have strong feelings in addition to sense, which works, of course, to her advantage in the end. Despite this lack of subtlety, the book is worth reading, for several reasons.

To start with, it’s an epistolary novel, a form which, Wikipedia says, has been around since the 15th/16th centuries. I don’t always like these novels, mainly because the letter form can break the narrative flow. I did find it a little challenging at first to work out who was who – until sorting that out became part of the fun. Given there’s no one authorial voice, it also took me a little while to work out which character/s, if any, Edgeworth, was aligning with. Was she, an Irish-sympathiser by-and-large, supporting British “sense” or French “sensibility”? However, the form provided Edgeworth with a neat way of presenting multiple first person points of view. It gave a freshness to the narrative, and enabled her to easily present different perspectives and characters. (By their own mouths shall they be known!)

Of course, I enjoyed the sense versus sensibility theme, not only because of the Austen comparison, but also because Edgeworth aligns them with national characteristics. Leonora was published during the Napoleonic Wars when England (the United Kingdom) was fearful of French invasion. It’s not surprising then that anything “French” was viewed askance. Leonora’s mother writes to her that a

taste for the elegant profligacy of French gallantry was, I remember, introduced into this country before the destruction of the French monarchy. Since that time, some sentimental writers and pretended philosophers of our own and foreign countries have endeavoured to confound all our ideas of morality.

Sensibility, then, is aligned with France and lack of morality – and, of course, vice versa for sense and England.

There is also some commentary on fiction and the novel, and that always interests me. Austen is, of course, famous for it in Northanger Abbey. (Indeed, one of the novels she references in her defence of the novel is Edgeworth’s Belinda.) Here, for example, is Leonora’s response to her mother, who had Olivia tagged at the outset. Leonora’s mother criticises Gothic novels, which Olivia reads: “they must have scènes and a coup de théâtre; and ranting, and raving, and stabbing, and drowning, and poisoning; for with them there is no love without murder”. Sensible Leonora has a more generous take:

Many people read ordinary novels as others take snuff, merely from habit, from the want of petty excitation; and not, as you suppose, from the want of exorbitant or improper stimulus. Those who are unhappy have recourse to any trifling amusement that can change the course of their thoughts. I do not justify Olivia for having chosen such comforters as certain novels, but I pity her and impute this choice to want of fortitude, not to depravity of taste. Before she married, a strict injunction was laid upon her not to read any book that was called a novel: this raised in her mind a sort of perverse curiosity. By making any books or opinions contraband, the desire to read and circulate them is increased.

Haha, I love the comment on the effect of banning books! Anyhow, interestingly, Olivia’s mentor Gabrielle, who later in the novel urges more dastardly plotting, tells her that such novels do not provide good advice for life:

Permit me to tell you, that you have been a little spoiled by sentimental novels, which are good only to talk of when one must show sensibility, but destructive as rules of action.

(And she goes on to say that “Love has been with you the sole end of love; whereas it ought to be the beginning of power.”)

I’ve been pretty brief here – really?, you say! – because each of the points I’ve touched upon could make a post in themselves. Leonora is not a subtle book, but I enjoyed reading it, partly for its place in literary history and culture, partly for its commentaries, and partly because it has a liveliness that I found engaging despite myself.

* Bill (The Australian Legend) is making a study of Mothers of the novel, starting here.)

Maria Edgeworth
Leonora
Library of Alexandria, 2012 (Orig. pub. 1806)
174pp.
ASIN: B0073UNBJC (Kindle ed.)
Available online at Project Gutenberg

Delicious descriptions: Eimear McBride is not all grim

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Reactions to Eimear McBride’s A girl is a half-formed thing, which I reviewed recently, vary greatly. It is, overall, a bleak read and its style is idiosyncratic, which makes it a double whammy. So, for example, it has been called “brutal” (by Sunday Times Ireland) and a “joyous thing” (by Michael Cathcart, RN’s Books and Arts Daily). Both of these make sense to me – the story is “brutal” but the writing is “a joyous thing”, because it’s alive, it wakes you up, it compels you on.

In 2013, as you may have already heard, it was the inaugural winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, which was “established to celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the University and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form. Accordingly, the annual prize of £10,000 will be awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best”.

Like most “brutal” works of art, though, A girl is a half-formed thing does have light or chuckle-inducing moments. I wanted to share one with you. Reviewers, I’ve noticed, have tended to choose a scene from the grandfather’s wake to illustrate this so I thought I’d choose something different, a description of Mammy being visited by her church friends early in the novel. Here goes:

Some most are women. In a blue moon a man. I like to eye. Sitting in the corner jugging as I can for all they say is interesting. Dress undressing no-neck cindy. Not stopping or I get look at little lugs there listening in. Oh taking it all in that one. Doesn’t miss a thing. Spelling I know but too iquick to understand r.u.n.o.f.f with the s.a.c.r.i.s.t.a.n and they are living in s.i.n down in such and such a place. There’s stink girl’s mother and her sister with women’s troubles so peculiar all pointed down and asked and how’s ahem? Ah she’ll not sit down for years. Apparently the smell of it is something wicked but god knows it’s not her fault. Their brother’s second wife — ach the first died leaving five behind. Tell me where’s the sense? They’re wild as wild. As bold as brats. The P.P’s housekeeper — God rest her late husband. A lovely man. She gave him a hard life but sure. Mrs one whose husband ran the AIB. Uppity up in herself — behind palms in the scullery they whisper adding a splash to warm the pot. Great red hat she wears to mass. So we have a look at her and where’s the humility in that? Ah each to their own, they say. Then your woman who bought a knitting machine. A hundred and twenty pounds now where did she … Her little boy. Downs. God love him. She does school jumpers so she can get him toys that are ed-u-cat-ional nod nod. That’s right for God helps those who help themselves. The politician’s wife they’d normally spite but God help us her heart is broke. He’s running about with this one and that one. She can’t look down on them. Her vows were sacred and he’ll not get her in mortal sin. Her heart may be pierced with a thousand spears but she’ll offer it as a penance that’s a bit proud don’t you think? And the one whose husband’s a desperate drunk. Like his father before him you know the type, vicious. That’d kill you in it by mistake. Her blue eyes. Her black eyes. Is he on the bottle? they say and pray for sometimes giving up and the forgiveness of his sins.

Go with it – and it’s perfect, a funny, biting rendition of women’s gossip. Stop to unpack the “sentences” – and you’re lost.

Eimear McBride, A girl is a half-formed thing (Review)

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Eimear McBride, A girl is a half-formed thingI try very hard when writing reviews to avoid clichés and superlatives, like, say, “achingly beautiful” or “masterful”. But I think I’m going to use one for Eimear McBride’s multi-award-winning debut novel A girl is a half-formed thing when I describe it as “searing”. I can’t think of a more apposite word. Yet I fear it too has been over-used to the point of meaninglessness. So, let’s try something else …

Once again I’m coming late to the read, and once again this is partly because it was scheduled by my reading group. All I can say is, wow. I’m not sure I’d go so far as Eleanor Catton’s “read it and be changed” commendation on the front of my edition, but I do agree with her  “virtuosic” and “subversive”. It’s a gut-wrenching read.

The plot itself is simple enough. It’s the story of a family – a pious one-could-say-religiously-fanatical mother, a son who survived a serious brain tumour as a toddler, and the younger daughter. The tumour leaves the son somewhat brain-damaged and, of course, it returns. This tumour, the trauma of it, shapes their behaviour and defines their relationships. The story, which spans around 20 years, is told through the daughter and could, in one sense, be seen as coming-of-age. But. This. Tells. You. Nothing. Because …

This is not your typical first-person voice. Instead, we are in the head of the unnamed “girl”. We are there in her conscious unconsciousness (or, is it her semi-consciousness?) in which we hear what she’s experiencing in language that is – here’s another cliché – raw. By this I mean that the language is stripped of the mediation of a formalising narrator’s intellect. Instead it captures the immediate emotional truth of the girl’s experience as she grapples to make sense of her world. This is a book in which the style conveys the meaning as much as the words do.

How does McBride do this you are probably wondering (unless, of course, you’ve already read the book). Well, mostly by breaking, consistently, the rules of grammar and syntax. We are in the girl’s head, a place where, I believe McBride is saying, we rarely think in coherently formed sentences but in what I would call “impressions”. Take, for example, this description, on the first page, of the brother before his diagnosis:

I know. The thing wrong. It’s a. It is called. Nosebleeds, headaches. Where you can’t hold. Fall mugs and dinner plates she says clear up. Ah young he says give the child a break. Fall off swings. Can’t or. Grip well. Slipping in the muck. Bang your. Poor head wrapped up white and the blood come through. She feel the sick of that. Little boy head. Shush.

To orient you, “she” is Mammy, “he” is the father who disappears two pages later, and “you” are the little boy, the girl’s brother. Most of the novel is addressed to him (that is “you”). One of the challenges of reading this book, and it is a challenge to read, is its pronouns. Once you’ve got a handle on them, and once you realise that they are all from the perspective of the girl, you are half way there.

Anyhow, there is easier syntax than the above when life is relatively calm but, when our “girl” is distressed such as when the truth of her brother’s situation can no longer be avoided, it collapses almost completely:

I walk the street. City. Running through my mouth. Running in my teeth the. My eyes are. All the things. The said the done what there what’s all this? That stuff. I could do. My. I walk the street. Who’s him there having a look at me he. Look at my. Tits. Ssss. Fuck word. No don’t. Fuck that. No. Will. Not that. Not. That. But. If I want to then I can do.

This is not the most extreme example – I don’t want to spoil too much – but it should demonstrate what I mean by the language mirroring/enacting/even being her state of mind.

In addition to the idiosyncratic syntax, McBride draws on wide range of literary techniques to keep us focused on, grounded in the emotions of the here and now. The imagery is visceral, returning again and again to  “muck”, “dirt”, “blood”, and “puke”. She alters her rhythms to match the tone, not only through the syntax as evident in the examples above, but through allusions to and repetitions of prayers and hymns, lines from children’s games, literary works and sayings. She makes up new words (“I trup trup off behind her”), mangles existing words (“swoll” for “swollen”), and twists common expressions (“There’s a foul there’s a wind where’s the air”). McBride was inspired by Joyce she says, but her fresh, fearless, urgent language reminded me too at times of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The novel is clearly set in Ireland and there are odd references to 1980s technology like Game Boys, but overall place and time are unspecified, and none of the characters are named. All this keeps the focus squarely on the emotional core of a family in pain, and the girl in particular. She is abused by her uncle at the age of thirteen and begins a strange love-hate, violent-tender, but sick, relationship with him. Sex becomes for her a weapon, a tool and a punishment. But the book is not about this, that is, it’s not yet another book about abuse. It is about the girl’s inability to handle her emotional pain, and her family’s inability to see her need, it’s about growing up unsupported. She is complicit in her own degradation because for her physical pain is better than the emotional. Like those who self-harm, she seeks out abuse again and again because

… what’s wrong here is me me me. Me the thing but I. Think I know. Is that the reason for what’s happened? Me? The thing. Wrong.

I know this all sounds unremittingly bleak and it largely is, but there are light touches – blackly comic scenes, surprising word plays, and chuckle-inducing descriptions (like her mother’s friends, “they polyester tight-packed womanhood aflower in pink and blue”).

A girl is a half-formed thing is hard to read style-wise and painful to read content-wise. But it is a book that, if you let it, reaches deep into your core and makes you understand the lives of others in a way that only the best literature can. I’m so very glad I read it.

John at Musings of a Literary Dilettante also liked it.

Eimear McBride
A girl is a half-formed thing
London: Faber and Faber, 2014
203pp.
ISBN: 9780571317165