In most novels, the
author leaves a trace - sometimes a very obvious one - of the imagined reader
who has inflected the writing. In contemporary fiction, it’s quite easy to find
novels which have been written with a film-director-looking-for-a-script lodged in mind. It’s very easy to find crowd-pleasing novels in which cardboard characters
are put in to represent the “under-represented”, thus ticking at least one and
preferably several current political correctness boxes. And, of course, it’s
still possible to find books where the author is clearly worried about what
their Mum might think.
Experimental prose
styles, like those deployed in this novel and (for a relevant contrasting example)
in Anna Burns’ Milkman, may be
designed with an aesthete or literary snob reader in mind. More often, I
suspect, they are ways of stopping any imagined reader from interfering with the
story. The writer is determined to tell the story they want to tell, and the
imagined reader can go hang. This often enough yields a commercially
unpublishable novel, and did in the case of Eimear McBride’s book.
Even now,
skimming the blurbs on the Faber edition, it’s quite clear that there is little
inclination to talk about one half of the book. The novel is dedicated to the
author’s dead brother and, indeed, the narrator in the novel tells at length
the story of her older brother’s life-long illness and early death - the novel
culminates with that death. Reviewers are comfortable with that. But half of
the novel is about rough sex, about masochistic sex, and about taboo sex - narrated
in detail and all of it (to simplify enormously) designed to fuck the narrator’s
pain rather than to bring pleasure or closeness. The publisher’s blurb on the
back cover of my Faber edition is really an extended trigger warning rather
than an engagement with this half of the book.
I did read it right
through, in short sessions. I can’t say I enjoyed it. In Milkman Anna Burns has an experimental style which carries the
reader along and is the vehicle for a great deal of humour. McBride has a style
which constantly frustrates the reader in their tracks, notably through the
repeated use of full stops, of sentences which aren’t, and of depictions which
are ambiguous or obscure - one isn’t always sure which. It is as if the text is
shot-through with a great deal of static through which one has to try to follow
the threads.
The threads are undoubtedly there, all the way through. The sick
brother and the rough sex threads are tied together with an Irish Roman
Catholic thread, which also perhaps deserves a trigger warning: there is a
horrific scene of the neighbours coming in to sit round the dying brother’s
bedside, help him on his way (pages 185-88).
All this produces a
novel of unremitting intensity with very, very few intermissions. There are a
handful of passages where the style changes. I noted these: page 92 where the
mother is telling her daughter her woes; pages 173 - 74 where the doctor tells
the brother that he is dying; page 197 where in the final sexual encounter the
prose completely breaks down in a (let’s say) Joycean manner. It’s not enough.
If I read the novel again (I won’t) I would look for more of these variations and any serious study
would want to look at the use of stylistic change within the narrative.
I can identify with a
writer’s need to keep out of their head the kind of reader who will frustrate
the writer’s story and I can see that a difficult prose style is one way of doing
that. But I would like to think that victory over the censorious reader, the
prurient reader, the tiresomely correct reader, could be achieved with a style
(or variation within a style) which is a little kinder to an actual reader. Equally, I can see that McBride's style is an attempt to convey the anguish of an inner world which any easier prose would tend to soften.
