I believe Eimear McBride got some sort of clause in her contract which obligates every reviewer to include the following sentence in their review, so here it is: “This book is brutally difficult to read, both in terms of its subject matter and style.”

And that is in fact the case: this book deals with brain tumors, incest, child abuse, sexual violence, and all sorts of other wonderful topics. All of that expressed in a broken and difficult language characterized by half-formed sentences, subject-verb disagreement, a total comma count (and I’m talking, book-wide) in the low single-digits, and towards the end, a memorable sequence in which words are run together, misspelled, and butchered beyond recognition. Lest I or every other reviewer has not yet made it plain, this book is meant to be challenging!

McBride is said to have read Ulysses and commented something like, “everything I’ve done before this is rubbish”, and then written this book. In that context, this book is thought to be neo-Joycean, a card-carrying member of the stream-of-consciousness movement. And yet I think that characterization is misleading, at least stacked up against the prototypes of Portrait of the Artist or Ulysses (and let’s remember, that is some pretty heavy-hitting company for a book.) Because the prose does not express the consciousness of the protagonist, at least not any sort of recognizable protagonist I can think of. For all of her difficulties, the hero is a pretty intelligent and competent person: she gets through school, earns high marks, and goes to college without a lot of support, monetary or cultural, from her family. And yet the “consciousness” expressed throughout the pages of the book is that of a 5-year-old, not that of a 13-year-old, and then an 18-year-old, and then a 20-something-year-old. (This problem, incidentally, is also something every reviewer is required to note.) Relatedly, the image clusters are not all that vivid and the metaphors are weak-to-nonexistent. There is, perhaps, some imagery around ingestion and digestion, a motif of violation and pain - but these are expressed more in raw prose than in abstract symbolism.

The language does have a life of its own, and it doesn’t follow that of the hero in the way that Stephen Daedalus’s language matured as the character himself did. It is the voice of something more primal and more basic within our hero, and that is why I think it is so strange. Because the language does indeed shift as the book moves along, but it does so in a zig-zag pattern, gaining some complexity during her initial burst of experimentation with a sexual force that she never quite controls, becoming suddenly clear and lucid during her grandfather’s funeral, and losing every pretense of structure and coherence during a moment of much more painful loss. The question is, whose voice are we hearing? It is not that of our hero, at least it’s not the voice she would use to speak to others nor indeed (I’m guessing) that she would write down in a diary. So what is it?

And more largely, what is the idea with this book? That is a problem that I’ve turned over in my head more than a few times. It is a book of extremes, in prose and language and characters and everything else. The drama is excessive and over-the-top. The world is one which is rife with abuse and violence, with only a few bright spots of humanity and genuine affection. (But these spots are actually quite touching; the moment when the hero gives her brother a talking-to about being a decent son, and he then shuffles downstairs sheepishly to spend the evening reading the paper with his mother, is just too sweet.) The hero’s goal in life appears to be to suffer so much violence and abuse that she can bury herself in the pain, to the point that she does not feel it anymore: it is literally a philosophy of self-violence brought to its logical conclusion.

A friend of mine thinks the book is illustrative and not polemical. I’m not sure about that - I do think it’s polemical, but not in the way that Joyce was, railing against the church and fulminating about the unborn conscience of his race or any of that. The message is entwined with the language, and so the question of, what is McBride trying to say? is very much tied together with the question of, whose voice are we listening to?

I don’t think that I have any particularly good answers to these questions. I would say that the voice is not that of our protagonist, nor of some abstracted part of her, such as “her heart” or “her brain”. I think it is the voice of emotional homelessness, made incarnate through her own particular story but larger than it. The point, as it were, may well be something in the vein of a protest against this endemic problem in our modern age - although the story is largely decontextualized, with some vague hints that it’s set in 1980’s Ireland. But I think it’s too difficult a story to be pinned down to such a plain reading, or put another way, if McBride wanted to write a book about emotional homelessness she might have done so much more easily than she did.

I think I gave this book perhaps too many stars from the point of view of basic enjoyment and just readability, but I give McBride some points for trying something really difficult.