In literary terms, Britain was a duller place 15 years ago: Booker judges looked for novels that “zip along”, editors were saying no to Deborah Levy and the publisher Jacques Testard couldn’t get a job. There was nothing for it but DIY: new houses, like Testard’s Fitzcarraldo Editions, and new prizes for new authors shut out by the risk-averse mentality that prevailed after the 2008 recession. Leading the way was Liverpool-born, Ireland-raised writer Eimear McBride, whose 2013 debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, a looping soliloquy published by Norwich startup Galley Beggar Press, won the inaugural Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction as well as the Women’s prize (then known as the Baileys), traditionally a more commercial award, in a sign that the thirst for novelty perhaps wasn’t so niche after all.
McBride’s new novel, The City Changes Its Face, is a stand-alone sequel to her second book, 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians, which was told by teenage drama student Eily, who comes to London from Ireland in the mid-90s and falls for Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, with an estranged daughter Eily’s age, living overseas after her mother couldn’t hack Stephen sleeping around – a snag for Eily, too.
The action resumes here in 1995, yo-yoing between the recent past – in particular, a momentous visit by said daughter, Grace – and a narrative here and now in which Eily hasn’t been leaving the house after a breakdown and Stephen is in a West End show, kissing his female co-lead on stage, something Eily’s sort-of not-quite OK with. McBride’s cutting between time frames repeatedly leaves us poised on one ticklish moment only to switch to another – whether Stephen has returned from work to find Eily and Grace drunkenly quizzing each other, or he’s just been left bloodied by a shattered jar of piccalilli during a row with Eily at home, where innocuous-sounding exchanges about sandwiches and tea can’t mask the volcanic undertow bubbling up from the individual miseries of their past (addiction, abuse, self-harm).
What unfolds is a two-for-one trauma plot involving love between bruised souls who aren’t walking on eggshells so much as tiptoeing blindfold across a tripwired minefield. This being McBride, it’s the telling that’s as important as the story; in seeking to portray what it’s like to live in a body and a mind, she operates at a frequency most novelists ignore, intuitively able to recognise how something so apparently insignificant as the position of type on a page – indentation, spacing, line breaks – can be pressed into communicating nuances of thought and emotion. And as in The Lesser Bohemians, frequent interruptions in a tiny font are deployed to show Eily quibbling with herself (there are more conventional tools for that, but McBride fights shy of commas and speech marks, never mind brackets).
The novel’s drama lies ultimately in the dance of Eily’s thoughts as she decodes Stephen’s words, calibrates her own, watching his gestures, craving, ultimately, for the validation she finds in his desire. Anything that makes that place harder to reach, whether Grace’s arrival or his refusal to ignore the marks on Eily’s wrists, fuels tension. For Eily, Stephen’s solicitousness for his daughter represents a threat, even though she likes Grace, who likes her too. The novel is most alive in that humanly messy tangle of almost unaccountable selfishness and anger, not least when her hopes of getting back into bed with Stephen – who is plagued by anxieties of his own – are stymied by Grace throwing up after one too many whiskies with Eily in the pub.
While it’s not period fiction – there are mentions of Kwik Save and the bookseller Samuel French but not John Major or Britpop – there’s an elegiac quality to the still-ungentrified dossiness of its north London setting, where any problem can be eased for a time by the discovery of a forgotten four-pack, a cadged ciggie or nipping out for chips. And while the end of the book leaves us hanging, true, the ceaseless friction to its central relationship means it carries far more oomph than McBride’s previous novel, 2020’s unsatisfyingly wafty Strange Hotel. You sense that in revisiting The Lesser Bohemians she’s continuing a project that’s far from done, and this reader, at least, would be glad if she decides the life of Eily is the place to be.
• 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
