A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear McBride

As a reader one kind of falls into the next sentence, and the next and the next.

pp.203

Publisher: Galley Beggar Press, 2013

It is easy to see how Eimear McBride’s novel has won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is a stylistic explosion in the relatively tepid contemporary fiction scene. It is the debut novel of an author in impressive control of voice and direction.

As the hectically narrated story unfolds, we understand that the protagonist’s brother has been diagnosed with a brain tumour. The girl is bullied heavily at school along with her scarred brother, which pushes her towards gaining control over her situation by sleeping with as many boys as possible. Her days away from home at university prove to be even more debauched as she becomes an alcoholic, drug-taking slut. After her brother takes a turn for the worse and is given a few weeks to live, she comes home to discover that the family dynamics have shifted radically, and as she deals with her dying brother’s condition, she also must deal with the uncle by whom she was ‘abused’ as a child and with whom she has more recently begun a love affair.

The plot arc is actually rather disappointing in its simplicity, its repetitiveness. It doesn’t cover new ground, but relies on its originality of method to explore already-charted territory more fully. Rough and violent sex becomes so commonplace in these pages that it starts to lack the impact it is supposed to have, as well as becoming tiresome and cloying.

However, the novel is all about style. McBride often cites Joyce as a big influence on her writing, and indeed she has produced here a Molly Bloom for the modern age. She has, though, made the stream-of-conscious narrative her own, the way the sentences are short and clipped rather than immensely long. Nevertheless, they are sentences of breath-taking beauty and intricacy. In differing from the Joycean method they actually achieve the same end – a hurried, tumbling rush towards the final word, much like the disjointed rush of thoughts.  

An interesting aspect of the novel is how easy it is to read, despite the liberties it takes with grammatical and syntactical coherence. As a reader one kind of falls into the next sentence, and the next and the next, until a general feeling is formed. Consequently the book is filled with intense streams of emotion and anguish that burst from the page.

This is certainly a well-felt novel. What it lacks in narrative ingenuity it makes up for in the energy and cleverness of its style. It makes my list of must-reads for the fact that it stands utterly alone amongst its contemporaries.  

Burial Rites - Hannah Kent

One can feel hopelessly isolated at times

pp.330

Published: Picador, 2013

In 1830, Agnes Magnusdottir, sentenced to death for murder and arson, was the last person to be executed in Iceland. Many accounts of the crime for which she was condemned and of the execution, as Hannah Kent points out in the author’s note, ‘hold a common view of Agnes as ‘an inhumane witch, stirring up murder.’’ Kent’s version of the story reimagines the events from the perspective of the maidservant herself, as well as the family forced to take her in as a prisoner while she awaits her death. As the family struggle to come to terms with the killer in their midst, Kent delivers a thoroughly sympathetic portrayal of the character.

From the very prologue we are given a sense of the novel’s attitude. In the line, ‘They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine,’ there is the suggestion of injustice, of a false accusation. In the space between ‘they said’ and what has actually happened, Kent writes over three hundred pages, all of them vital, urgent, and necessary in reshaping the emotional investment of the characters in Agnes’ struggle with the truth.    

The way that this is achieved is through a striking combination of official documentation, third person narration, and monologue. It slowly builds up a precise picture of the events. The cold, factual information contained in the trial reports and letters combines well with the sentimental, charged passages written from Agnes’ perspective. The third person allows a shift in perspective, so that we can see how others react and are altered by what they learn through the course of the book.

Kent’s writing is intelligent in that its pacing is that of a high-grade thriller, intense and plot-driven, whereas the novel also has a compelling literary quality. This author has the ability to write sentences of enormous emotional power and deep metaphysical and social value. The book is equally an entertaining journey and a relevant exploration of the treatment of women and suspected criminals in an era and country not very well-equipped to deal with crime of this magnitude. Be prepared to be morally outraged.

Agnes is introduced to us as an animal, held in the store-room of a farm at Stora-Borg, sometimes with her legs tied together like ‘the forelegs of horses, to ensure I will not run away.’ As she is taken to  Thristopar to await her execution and begins working as she used to on the farm, and then further on as she makes significant impressions on the family who have taken her in, we begin to love her and to feel sorry for her. In retelling her story either to the Reverend, to herself, or to Margret, we get a sense of her utter loneliness, her unluckiness to have lived a life so devoid of sympathetic human contact. She describes in one passage the period of time she spent with Natan, the man she is supposed to have killed: ‘I had no friends. I didn’t understand the landscape. Only the outlying tongues of rock scarred the perfect kiss of sea and sky – there was no one and nothing else. There was nowhere else to go.’

This idea of entrapment by landscape is prevalent throughout the book. Bare open expanses. Storms often raging through the country, cutting districts off completely from one another. The loneliness inherent in such a world and in such weather is a ubiquitous feeling in Burial Rites. One can feel hopelessly isolated at times.

No wonder, then, that the novel was written from Kent’s own experiences of isolation as an exchange student in Iceland. Her feelings of alienation feed the lonesome passages of the book like the plaintive moan and whistle of a cold wind. It gives the energy and drive necessary to power such a beautiful lament as this. And while the landscape is lonely, it is nevertheless poetically, vastly gorgeous. Something about the narration suggests that the author is compulsively attracted to the country, to its mysterious, almost holy beauty, despite its long echoes of the void.    

This is a valuable story that will often be read quickly, as its tensions are maintained throughout. The reader’s opinions about the murders, and about the nature of Agnes Magnusdottir, that inhumane witch, are changed drastically by the end. And the denouement, which comes as no surprise but as an irrevocable inevitability, is charged with an astounding emotional force.    

The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds

A veritable maze of humanity

pp.259

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2009. 

The Quickening Maze follows the lives of the poets John Clare and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and of Matthew Allen who runs High Beach Private Asylum, where Clare and Tennyson’s brother Septimus reside. Amongst Clare’s attempts to gain freedom and Allen’s plans to design a machine that mass-produces furniture, along the way getting Tennyson to inject money into the scheme, we also follow Hannah, Allen’s daughter, who is intensely pre-occupied by thoughts of courtship and marriage.

All the individual characters meld in a unique way in this book’s portrayal of how different forms of insane behaviour can affect lives. Matthew Allen’s mania becomes the most pathetic portrait of the book, as he struggles with his impecunious past, fleeing into a future much the same. Tennyson is the larger-than-life poet at a time when poets were a curiosity, when to compose poems could be a revered profession, noble and gentrified. He is an isolated figure, slightly tormented by his isolations, suffering with the critical rejections of his work. The girl who falls for him, Hannah, is young and naïve, anxious to impress and embark upon a woman’s life.

But John Clare, as intended, steals the show. He is a fascinating study of a mind crumbling from delusions and intense, unfulfilled desire. His quest is for freedom in the natural world, for his ex-wife, and for his home. There are gaps in the narrative that reflect the gaps in his own existence as he begins to believe, alternately, that he is a boxer called Jack Randall or the poet Lord Byron. We are flung into a tumultuous confusion as these names come and go without explanation, and as he demands again and again to see his wife who has not been his wife for some time.  

These delusions are substantiated when he comes into contact with a group of gypsies and when he believes one of the other inmates at the asylum to be Mary, his wife (and duly sleeps with her in one frantic, disturbing passage towards the end of the book).

Foulds’ writing in this novel is exceedingly capable, refined to the point of perfection.  His multiple perspectives circle one another expertly, with the pertinent imagery of the asylum at their centre. Perhaps more could be done, in that it is a novel of vaulting ambition and does not quite fulfil its potential. But it is nevertheless a veritable maze of humanity.  

All the Birds, Singing - Evie Wyld

A tense and moving plot which explores deeper meanings behind the haunting past

pp.229

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2013

Evie Wyld is a fearless writer. The first sentence of All the Birds, Singing reads, ‘Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.’ She is unafraid of violence, of the horrifying, of monsters and what they represent, and yet much of her prose is lyrical, poetic, beautiful. Gorgeous in places. This dynamic novel contains the subtle and it contains the heavy-hitting punches of a viscerally disturbing piece of fiction.

Her technique is to have the running narrative pursued by flashbacks of the past which move backwards in time, slowly and heart-achingly, digging deeper and deeper, unveiling more and more. In this respect, the plot is very skilfully drawn out for us, much like a genre fiction novel. Cliff hangers aside, though, this is a novel with literary aspirations, a tense and moving plot which explores deeper meanings behind the haunting past, the past which never leaves us.

Jake Whyte lives alone on a farm in the British Isles, tending to her sheep and denying herself the comforts of human interaction. The reason for this slowly becomes clear as we are dipped into her past again and again until we understand exactly how she has got to where she is. It is a past of prostitution, bullying, homelessness and sheep shearing. As something begins killing off her sheep in the night, Jake’s backstory circles in on the true purpose of her solitary existence.    

This method of telling the story backwards gives us the sense of the protagonist becoming more and more naïve. In developing the character, Wyld works towards a kind of anti-development, or a backwards development. As such it seems, to the novel’s detriment, that the denouement, the big secret in Jake Whyte’s past that she is running from, is a bit of an anti-climactic revelation as it works against the image of her up to that point. However, the author cleverly maintains our sympathy in Jake despite what takes place, which one can tell from the very beginning of the novel is going to be a difficult task. It also makes us consider how a moment of madness can change our lives forever. Yet the redemptive quality of the novel is striking.

All the Birds, Singing is about isolation, inner demons and desperation. It is also funny in places. It is a novel full of empty spaces that sit hauntingly amongst the narration, allowing the reader to fill them.