Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language. The subject matter of her fiction, from A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing onwards, is transgressive. In 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians and in this new novel, not so much a sequel as a variation, she writes about incestuous child abuse, self-harm, suicide, heroin addiction, a miscarriage deliberately induced by rough penetrative sex, and about lots and lots of other sex between a couple whose ages (she’s not yet 20, he’s nearly 40) are likely to give modern readers pause. But what is most startling about McBride’s work is not its dark material, but the way she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it.
The City Changes Its Face has a doubled and entwined time scheme. It is the 1990s, north London, an area dirtier and poorer than it is now; we begin two years after The Lesser Bohemians left off. The lovers of that novel, Eily, the teenage drama student, and Stephen, the established actor with a traumatic past, have been living together. Something awful has happened. In the sections headed Now they are having an agonised conversation about that event. They move from pleas and accusations to a row, then to a thrown jar of piccalilli and bloodshed, followed by penitence and confessions and, at last, a reconciliation. This book-long conversation is interspersed with retrospective sections – headed First Summer, Second Winter and so on – in which we are shown, in scattered episodes, how they arrived at this point. As the two narratives converge on the awful event, its nature is gradually revealed. The event is easily guessed, but there is more to it, the final twist having as much to do with McBride’s narrative form as it does with her story.
It’s a complex structure, skilfully controlled. About halfway through, it is interrupted by a movie. The book gives us access to Eily’s interior self; not so with Stephen. In The Lesser Bohemians, McBride got inside his mind with a long passage of reported speech. In the new novel, she manages more adroitly. Stephen has made an autobiographical film. He shows it to Eily and his adolescent daughter (whose return after years of estrangement is an important strand of the plot). Eily describes it shot by shot. While much of the novel reads like a script – lots of dialogue – this section, paradoxically, does not. Eily, putting what she sees on screen into words, merges colour with sound, light with pace, always alive to the shift of a camera angle, to the way music accentuates mood. It’s a bravura piece of descriptive writing.
An inventive framework, then, but McBride’s originality is most striking in the way she handles words. She uses verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives. On a hot day “the boil outside makes sloth of in here”; on a cold one, a caress is “a skate of chill hands”. Stephen’s damaging history is “the past’s thwart of your now”. McBride coins new words: “blindling” for blindly stumbling. She gives familiar ones new cogency by misplacing them: “all his vaunt’s gone”. She is playful, planting puns and submerged quotations in the stream of Eily’s consciousness. And then she will spin a line in which grubby imagery is rendered lyrical by rhythm: “Down where the foxes eat KFC, and night drunks piss, and morning deliveries will bleep us headachely up from dreams.”
Eily’s sentences end abruptly with no regard for syntax. If a fragment is sufficient to convey a mood, then why plod on to completion? Punctuation is wayward. Word order is unorthodox enough to make some passages read like prose translated directly from the German. The tone shifts between Eily’s whirling inner thoughts and the banality of everyday chat. And there is yet another voice, printed in a smaller font, the still, small voice of that part of Eily that whisperingly tells her (and us) when she is deluding herself.
This novel, with the city in its title, is at its most lyrical not in love scenes but in cityscapes. McBride’s characters are often cold, often rain-soaked, just occasionally getting sunburned on Hampstead Heath. Weather is important, because to venture into public space is perilous but necessary. A dream sequence conjures up the sensation of flying, not by soaring high in the blue but by adopting the point of view of a camera strapped to the underside of a pickup truck swaying down the Holloway Road. Within this teeming urban setting, though, the characters are isolated. Sometimes this means happiness: “We were an atoll of our own.” Often it means confinement. A dark bedsit, where lovers squeeze themselves into a single bed. A shared flat whose uncurtained windows look on to an elevated walkway – nothing green in sight. McBride celebrates the city, its sadness and grunginess and grandeur. London, she writes, “serves itself”, indifferent to its inhabitants, “unceasing in its ever on”.
This is classic European modernism – McBride salutes Dostoevsky, Proust, Tarkovsky, Kundera – but it has been remade in the service of intimacy. Eily, lustful at an inappropriate moment, reflects “what a great thing it is that thinking is private”. McBride, ignoring linguistic convention to bring us up close to her character, allows us the illusion that that privacy can be breached.
• The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
