This is not a beach read, and Eimear McBride would undoubtedly take that as the compliment it is intended to be. McBride is not interested in giving readers an easy ride; the task she sets herself, with this Goldsmiths prize-winning book, is to stretch the possibilities of language. Sentences are short, fragmented, and more akin to poetry than prose. The opening three pages, written from the perspective of a child still in the womb, are a blur of wonky grammar and confused sensations: "For you. You'll soon. You'll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she'll wear your say."
Readers who persist through the fug, though, will find themselves transported deep into the mind of the narrator, experiencing her reality in an uncannily tangible way. Scraps of colloquial speech are interwoven with tastes, sounds and memories: "Get a lungful of that in you and see how you do, she says cigarette filter fraying brown on her tongue. Thoo pthoo." The stuff of the story is miserable and often sordid – the narrator's brother has a brain tumour in childhood, with catastrophic effects on the whole family – but McBride weaves something dazzling from it, displaying huge ambition at a time when female writers are too often consigned – or consign themselves – to the chick-lit category. She set out to pick up the experimental modernist baton from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and she has done just that.
It is a sad reflection on the publishing industry that this book languished unpublished for more than 10 years. McBride has recalled in interviews that publishers would tell her they loved the manuscript but that they couldn't buy it because such a challenging text would never find a readership. It was only when an acquaintance set up a small publishing house, the Galley Beggar Press, that the novel saw the light of day. Thank goodness, then, for the Goldsmiths prize – "established to celebrate the quality of creative daring" – which has put McBride's achievement firmly on the map. Let's hope that her success will open up a little more space for writers who want to do something rather more interesting than produce yet another imitation of Fifty Shades of Grey.
