A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing
By Eimear
McBride
(Galley Beggar
Press, £11.00 stg)
This
debut novel by Liverpool born, west of Ireland raised, Norwich resident
McBride, has been garlanded with glowing reviews in the London Review of Books and the Times
Literary Supplement. These notices tended to emphasise the book’s
originality and experimentalism. However, what inventiveness or exploration
there is resides in an obtuse use of language and idiosyncratic punctuation,
which disdains the preposition, enjoys scrambled syntax, and fairly eschews the
common comma (although I did spot a total of two in the course of the 203
pages). Beneath this enigmatic playfulness, the subject matter and narrative
trajectory remain tediously conventional.
The
story, told in the first person singular and addressed to the second person
singular, concerns an unnamed female narrator and her unnamed older brother
(every character in this novel is unnamed). There are a couple of years between
them, and the tale begins when she is two and he is four, ending when our girl
is 20. There is a strong bond between them, oscillating from embarrassment to
affection. He was born with a brain tumour which was removed, but is considered
a ‘thicko’ at school. The reoccurrence of his illness, this time inoperable and
so terminal, is the spur for the novel’s dramatic finale.
It’s perhaps not surprising they are close:
their father abandons the household when they are infants, and their
tyrannically religious mother beats them, and tries to set them against each
other. The brother also ‘plays’ the mother, in having her wait on him hand and
foot. While our heroine is away at college (although it is deemed too trivial actually
to tell us what she is studying), he stacks shelves in a local supermarket by
day, and becomes a lazy, antisocial, nerdy computer gamer by night.
In typical bildungsroman fashion, the story
arc chronologically follows the narrator through school and its social jostling,
adolescent rebellion and loss of virginity, that departure from messed up home
to college and undergraduate shenanigans, a rejection of her mother’s fierce
brand of evangelical religion, the temporary relief of sexual promiscuity
(‘Saying yes the best of powers’ – presumably when boys expect you to say ‘no’),
all culminating in a return to the family homestead for her brother’s last days
and death. Along the way she is seduced by a visiting uncle from England when aged
13 and has an intermittent affair with him, and seeks out increasingly violent
sexual encounters with strangers. She likes being beaten up.
There is long and complex history of Irish
writers making good in England by presenting versions of the Irish experience
which merely cater to and reinforce English perceptions and prejudices of Irish
stereotypes. When Joyce saw what happened to Wilde in London, it made him only
more determined to flee Ireland to continental Europe, and strengthened his
refusal to ‘play court jester to the English.’ In our own day, there is still no
shortage of Irish writers queuing up to tell the Brits what they want to hear,
in publications such as the London Review
of Books, conscious no doubt of the worldwide publicity and distribution
attendant on a lucrative London publishing deal. In falling over themselves to
demonstrate how ‘over’ the postcolonial chip on the shoulder they are, they
serve only to show how much it still weighs them down.
One wonders where Eimear McBride situates
herself in this scenario. Although, like everything else, the setting and
timeline are frustratingly vague, passing references to Walkmen and Dexy’s
Midnight Runners’ song ‘Come On Eileen’ signal we are in the ’80s, that not so
fondly remembered time of referenda civil wars. True, the death last year of Savita Halappanavar in a
Galway hospital, because ‘this is a Catholic country’, proved Catholicism can
still kill; while the subsequent debate around the Protection of Life During
Pregnancy Bill, with rosary sayers scattering holy water on unbelievers outside
Dail Eireann, reminded us that these people never learn and the crazies haven’t
gone away. But, as even church goers themselves would admit, Catholicism,
extreme or otherwise, has become an increasingly peripheral part of contemporary
Irish life. So why is a youngish writer like McBride writing about the past?
It’s not exactly like Catholic totalitarianism isn’t a well covered topic in
Irish literature. Could it be that she thinks this kind of account of Ireland
still sits well with certain readers across the water?
Lots of fundamentalist religion; lots of
rough sex: unlike most ‘experimental’ fiction, it should sell well.
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