The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride review: 'gets under your skin'
With its challenging themes, narrative complexity and endlessly inventive prose style, The City Changes Its Face is literature for grown-ups, writes Stuart Kelly
One rather modest ambition I have never achieved is to find someone who has read Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel but not Wolf Hall, and find out what they made of it. To be honest, I did not think it should have won the Booker Prize, as I would have to be convinced it was a standalone work. I mention this as a caveat: although I think Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Face is a significant, affecting work, I cannot read it without the memory of The Lesser Bohemians, to which it is a sequel. My strong hunch – and I am prepared to be argued away from this stance – is that it does require foreknowledge of its predecessor. That, however, does not diminish my admiration for it.
Indeed, the very first page is astonishingly assertive. The very first words are the title – normally I am primed to see the significant placing of titles within texts, if at all. The next sentence has the askance use of language that seems typical of McBride – “rain going delinquent beyond”, and then grammatical inversions to postpone – “Cold lips white”, “Under fingernails, blue”. Note the difference the comma makes, and how the effect of “white lips cold” would be different and more predictable with a comma added. The verbless fragments: “His smile then. And I smile back” (it doesn’t quite work unless you have the “and” – with which you supposedly never start a sentence – along with the change of “smile” from noun to verb). Before the end of the page there is a gap, a hiatus or lacuna in the sentence “fine you?”, another signature technique, and then a flourish of invention with “The spareliest of nods”. There is certainly more of that – echoly, upskittlement, finicketing. I cannot explain why these words do not draw attention to themselves. Moreover, the text is staggered and indented, more like a dramatic script than a novel, appropriately enough. All this to decode and negotiate in only 120 words! It is just the opening page and it could not be written by anyone other than Eimear McBride. If a young post-grad is looking for a doctoral topic, a comparison of the differing fractured prose styles of Eimear McBride and Sally Rooney would be an intriguing topic.
Although it has been almost a decade since The Lesser Bohemians was published, the action in The City Changes Its Face dovetails almost exactly – it is 1995, and the drama student Eily has moved in with the older Stephen. Eighteen in the previous book, she will turn 20 in this one. The novel is divided between a present day “now” and flashbacks to “this autumn gone” - the “now” part is basically a long evening’s journey into night. There is one major revelation, but it is counterpointed to Stephen’s daughter, Grace, being reunited with him for the first time since infanthood. Grace is only marginally younger than Eily.
As in The Lesser Bohemians, a large part of the novel is given over to Stephen’s narrative, though in this case it is of an autobiographical film which Eily and Grace are allowed to see for the first time. Stephen does not play Stephen in the film, but that is perhaps insufficient distance to evoke any catharsis as they, and we, “see” the extent of his damage. The multiple frames and retellings are crucial in that we cannot be unaware of how the narrative is being shaped in different ways: Stephen, for example, notes potential changes through the private screening. Although McBride’s form has been described as “stream of consciousness”, the singular seems inadequate to me. Typographical diminuendo allows for a second, still small voice to contradict and upbraid Eily’s own version.
Again, and the reader may import some of this from The Lesser Bohemians, the subject of Stephen’s abusive mother is broached, but this time with a heart-stopping twist: a fear that, in Larkin’s words, man hands on misery to man; or here a malign hereditary, “in you like it was in me… on and on and on. My father to me and me to you and you to…” This is compounded by Eily’s similarity in age to Grace, although the scene of them trying to sleep but terribly conscious of Grace next door is archly funny if also toe-curling and poignant. It would be remiss to reveal the plot point so patiently deferred, but I think it is permissible to say that McBride’s two plots rest on the tangential, provisional and friable nature of happiness. It is a rare gift to write happiness like the tip of an iceberg of anguish and yet maintain that it is happiness. As Woolf said of George Eliot, this is literature for grown-ups.
It is cleverly telling that on their bookcases, Kafka and Sarah Kane are next to each other. I could not quite fathom Eily studying Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682, and I have actually read it: maybe the lines “clocks will go as they are set; but man, / Irregular man, ne’er constant, never certain”?) Perhaps the most astonishing feature of this remarkable book is that I subvocalised the whole thing – I did not read it aloud, but my lips moved constantly. It gets under one’s skin to that extent.
The City Changes Its Face, by Eimear McBride, Faber & Faber, £20
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