Eimear McBride's stunning debut pushes the boundaries of the novel form

Those who can stomach McBride's stream of consciousness narrative will find great rewards
Melanie McDonagh26 June 2015

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Faber, £7.99)

Eimear McBride’s debut novel has carried all before it — critics and prizes, notably the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction — since it was published by a small new publishing house in Norwich. Which is quite something for a novel that she wrote at the age of 27 — it took nine years to find a publisher. To call it experimental is hardly to do justice to its disregard for syntax and fully formed sentences.

There’s a narrative here all right but it’s inside the narrator’s head, from foetus to troubled 20-year-old. It’s a story of abuse, exploitation, bullying, emotional cruelty, sexual abasement and the love of a sister for a brother and it could only have been written by someone formed in Ireland with the keenest ear for the nuance of Irish speech. Those half-formed, often one-word or half-word stream of consciousness sentences are only intelligible in an Irish context.

The obvious backdrop for the novel is Joyce and the author cheerfully admits that she began it as a “rip-off of Ulysses” before it took on a life of its own. The prose follows the way the mind works, not following things through in full sentences, but jumping from one thought to another, from one sensation to another. Indeed, the only entirely coherent passages are remembered prayers, which convey an occasional curiously lyrical quality to the narrative. The remarkable thing is that, given its apparent incoherence, the novel tells a coherent story.

It’s of a nameless girl whose brother is mentally handicapped, whose father left, whose mother is a religious obsessive with a sideline in physical cruelty, and who is ruthlessly and relentlessly sexually abused by a member of her own family and every other man who gets the chance. Actually, the passages I found most unbearable were of the entirely convincing, horrible treatment the brother gets from his schoolmates.

This novel eschews representation — McBride thinks that with the internet the days of pure description and narrative are over — and that means it is, to put it mildly, a dense read. Before paying eight quid, read a few paragraphs first, to see if you can stay with the style; lots of people won’t.

Take the description of the girl falling back on sex for distraction from her trouble: “That’s stuff. I could do. My. I walk the street. Who’s him? That man. Who’s him there having a look at me he. Look at my. Tits. Sss. Fuck word. No don’t. Fuck that. No. Will. Not. That. Not. That. But. If I want to then I can do.”

See what I mean? Incidentally, for a novel without a moral, this amounts to an extended warning against mindless promiscuity.

But for those who have the stomach to stay with it, there are rewards: the shock of encountering something new and real. I don’t myself think McBride is right that the traditional novel is over but this is a new form, all right, though I don’t know how anyone less expert would make it work. The prospect of imitations is pretty awful.

McBride said that many of the publishers who rejected the book admired the writing but felt it wouldn’t fit any obvious marketing niche. That tells you something about the industry, though nothing we didn’t already know. This novel has redeemed the half-discredited institution of the literary prize as a means to attract recognition to writing that deserves reward. Her next book, by contrast, will be on joy. That’s a mercy.

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