A tale of two McBrides

By TOBY LICHTIG

Difficult second novel? Not, on the basis of a reading I attended on Monday night, for Eimear McBride. The Irish author, who won a Hilary Mantel-esque slew of prizes (not to mention critical acclaim) for her brilliant debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing was at a Faber Social evening to give us a taster of The Lesser Bohemians. This was the first public outing of a novel slated to appear next year.  

McBride has been writing this book for the past decade ��� in fact ever since she finished Girl, which was notoriously rejected by various agents and publishers before finally being picked up by Henry Layte of Galley Beggar Press in 2012. No one, then, can accuse the author or her new publishers, Faber, of rushing to get the second one out there. And if the excerpt we were treated to is anything to go by, we can expect a similarly compelling, linguistically dazzling, emotionally unruly literary bombshell.  

McBride ��� who trained as an actress ��� read beautifully from a passage in which the novel���s heroine, an eighteen-year-old drama student, newly living in London, unexpectedly runs into the thirty-eight-year-old man to whom she lost her virginity. The pair immediately begin to flirt, and one thing leads to another.

The syntax and wordplay will be immediately recognizable to readers of McBride���s debut. Posturing banter and self-doubt combine in a cocktail of emotional febrility (���He is laughing and I almost am over my chasing brain���), before the pair head off in pursuit of crispy duck in Soho, the man striding ahead of her (���I���m lagging his gait���). Later, when she gets back to his place, guards, and clothes, are swiftly dropped, ���modesty flying everywhere���.

The tone here is significantly lighter than that of Girl, the sexuality less troubled and destructive, the author allowing herself space to luxuriate in the humour of the exchange. Parts of Girl were very funny, too, particularly when centred on religious hypocrisy, but the narrator of Bohemians seems less angry, less of a victim, or at the very least someone able to take care of herself. McBride has said that this second book, unlike the first, is about ���surviving���. Perhaps it will be less raw (rawness, in the case of Girl, being a major plus point), but I also wonder if it will be more rounded, more panoptic. Either way, everything I heard further increased my appetite for the novel l���m most looking forward to next year.

 

Before then, however, we can look forward to another long awaited literary McBride ��� this one the heroine of Edna O���Brien���s new novel, her first in ten years, The Little Red Chairs, which is due out from Faber in February. O���Brien���s McBride is a Fidelma (which I���m told is Eimear���s middle name ��� what are the chances?), who falls under the spell of a war criminal in a rural village on the west coast of Ireland. It is, according to the publishers, ���a story about love, the artifice of evil and the terrible necessity of accountability in our shattered, damaged world���.

McBride (Eimear) was clearly a little nervous of performing in front of her own literary idol (���People who say never meet your heroes are liars���, she said), though O���Brien���s presence was anything but austere. Now eight-five, though you���d never have guessed it, she lit up the room with her presence (a clich��, I know, but, really, she sparkled). And, having apologised for the lack of levity in her material, she went on to give a wonderful reading, including a highly amusing passage featuring a garrulous barman (���I do the gym, I do the gym, I do a bit of the cardio���).

If it seemed a little unfair to give these two Irish mega-stars (one the doyenne, one the prot��g�� ��� at least in terms of influence) billing with the other authors on Faber���s forthcoming list, the organisers (unlike this blogger) had the good grace to let the other three go first:

Dan Richards (who co-wrote Holloway with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood) read from Climbing Days, his forthcoming (spring, 2016) book on mountaineering, set on the trail of his great-great-aunt, the mountaineer Dorothy Pilley. Harry Parker gave us three short chapters from his debut novel Anatomy of a Soldier (2016) set during the recent war in Afghanistan and seen from the viewpoint of a variety of inanimate objects (a tourniquet, a breathing tube, etc). The conceit was interesting though it remains to be seen whether the grimly observed sketches of explosions and surgical emergencies cohere into something like a narrative. And Viv Albertine, formerly of punk band The Slits, (���I���d rather be sharing the stage with these writers tonight than headlining at Glastonbury���) and, more recently, the author of the rock memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. read from a work-in-progress, which ��� I think ��� was called Bag of Truth (apologies if I misheard). It is, according to Faber, ���less memoir and more window on the world as Viv sees it today���. The passage in question was a diligently turned howl against capitalist society and the lack of options for young people who want to be part of a noble cause ��� all read directly from the screen of her Apple Mac. Albertine seemed quite at home on the literary stage. But it was McBride and O���Brien who stole the show.