Reading the opening pages of The Lesser Bohemians, I wondered if I might still be in the world of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Here was a diffident 18-year-old Irish girl talking, writing or thinking in Eimear McBride’s characteristic broken sentences, gliding between the demotic and the lyrical. “Daub my soul with a good few pints til my mouth swings wide with unutterable shite. Laughing lots too, like it’s true. Worldening maybe, I think. I hope.” I felt anxious that the voice that had seemed to be created for the heroine of A Girl had suddenly become the voice of an apparently different character, and that we were expected to accept this and read these sentences as though for the first time.
In fact, McBride’s style is more capacious than it might seem. The voice here is different, though it takes a couple of chapters to feel your way into its cadences. The girl whose head we are in now is more eagerly poetic, more gently amused, more responsive to the sights around her. This is Eily, a young drama student new to the London of the 1990s and determined to lose her virginity as quickly and decorously as possible.
Eily meets Stephen, a 38-year-old actor, wiry, handsome, damaged. He is promiscuous on principle, dedicated to sensual pleasure but determined to control the feelings it unleashes. The two embark on a course of friendly but casual sex that turns, without either of them quite understanding what is happening, into a love affair that frightens them both in its intensity. Most of the book chronicles in microscopic detail their encounters in bed and out of it, offering a lens on to the touch and talk of lovers unlike any I have come across before.
What is most remarkable, and it’s not something we could see in the more consistently destructive world of A Girl, is McBride’s sensitivity to moment-to-moment shifts in feeling. She allows any conversation or sexual encounter to be a journey where the characters cannot know where they are going or who they will be when they get there.
It is notoriously difficult to write about sex, and McBride does it better than almost any other contemporary novelist I’ve read. Because of the way the voice works, we don’t see Eily’s body but we feel it from within. We know exactly what the lovers are doing but there’s nothing here that could be entered for the Bad Sex award. McBride manages to get across the essential strangeness of sex itself: the disjunction between the triviality and repetition of the physical acts and the intense, high emotion with which we can experience them; the way that within a single encounter we can go from being just bodies, doing odd things to each other, to minds, urgently expressing love, without it being easy to define what has shifted.
McBride evokes brilliantly the distinctive pleasure of days spent in bed, moving imperceptibly between humour and passion, and between violent and tender desire. “Bodies knowing the other’s well from before but everything else running through now, making it rare … and the desire that follows, no matter what we do, cannot be spent up and does not let go.” And she shows that it is these days in particular that are in danger of collapsing into alienated despair, because lovers are not quite in control of the vulnerability they have unleashed. “We are in such fragile skin, so close to getting lost in the in-between.”
In the light of all this, McBride’s absence from the Booker longlist is surprising, but I can see how the judges might have thought this a more flawed book than the densely perfect A Girl. In the second half, the novel opens up so that we can see the world beyond Eily’s head. This is done through pages of reported speech: we hear Stephen’s story through a long reported monologue, and then hear him recounting a monologue from his ex-wife. In an account that has gained its force from our being deep inside the head of the central character, it feels difficult to move on to accepting the narrative convention that we talk in paragraphs and can recall the paragraphs of those around us. There is also the question of balance: the novel becomes a little baggy at this point, and we are taken quite abruptly into a less easily realistic, more dangerous and destructive world. In these closing sections, the plot starts to feel more determined. There is no longer the sense I admired in the first half that what happens to the characters has the same randomness as the sex described; the sense that you have no idea where they will end up.
But if it is less perfect than A Girl, then it is a book to live with in a different way. I found that I thought about it more urgently, and that for days afterwards it was still shaping my sense of the world. This is especially remarkable given the experimental form. McBride has been compared to Joyce, and her debt to him is sometimes explicit, but this seems to be creative innovation with a different end from his. At her best, McBride is fulfilling Woolf’s injunction to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall”.
Both McBride and Ali Smith have achieved the apparently unlikely feat of winning the avant-garde Goldsmiths prize and the more populist Baileys prize for the same book. They have managed to do this because, in both cases, to say that they are experimental writers misses the ease with which we read them. Reading McBride is simple as well as exhilarating because in gleefully puncturing the sentence she is allowing us to inhabit a character’s mind and body. The world that emerges is startlingly familiar precisely because it is rendered less familiar by the prose. The blending of speech and thought, of present and past, and the disjunction between interior and exterior worlds are all part of daily experience.
The Lesser Bohemians confirms McBride’s status as one of our major novelists. She writes with beauty, wisdom and humour and she is uniquely sensitive to what is being communicated with every look or jerk of the body. If, in DH Lawrence’s formulation, the novel is “the one bright book of life”, then the life here radiates through the pages and illuminates ours.
• Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich (Bloomsbury). To order The Lesser Bohemians for £12.99 (Faber, RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
