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.