The Lesser Bohemians

But I have come into my kingdom where only pens and pencils were. Abrupt and all abrupt. No longer minnow in the darkness and the deep. Through the portholes and currents I’ve been. Going to the surface. Up into the sun. Touch my own throat. His long arm. Shining like a body come fresh into the light.

The plot of The Lesser Bohemians can be summarised all too briefly: An eighteen-year-old girl comes from small town Ireland to London in order to study acting and becomes romantically entangled with an older, successful actor whose childhood demons have prevented him from ever knowing real love before. And as a follow-up to the much lauded A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, one can expect (and does find) that author Eimear McBride will continue to play with language and syntax and narrative forms. And while neither of these facts (soap opera-ish plot + challenging writing) might sound like an enjoyable reading experience, the truth of small moments throughout had me streaming with tears, and I'm left wrung out, flattened, and satisfied. I'm not without complaints, and I appreciate that this book wouldn't be for everyone, but I'm so happy that I finally picked it up. To begin at the beginning, this is the opening paragraph:

I move. Cars move. Stock, it bends light. City opening itself behind. Here's to be for its life is the bite and would be start of mine.

And I still have no idea what that paragraph means. But, take cheer, the prose becomes more accessible, and the reader eventually picks up McBride's quirks; as one does when learning another language. Told from the perspective of the Irish maiden (we don't learn her name 'til halfway through), we gather that she has led a sheltered, protected life, and once in the city and exposed to drink and drugs and casual sexual advances for the first time, she is eager to embrace all that her new life offers. When she meets a charming older man at the pub one night, and is just drunk enough to play brazen, she agrees to go back to his place and secretly unburden herself of her virginity. The scene that follows is so totally believable – from the surprising squalor of the man's bedsit to the graphic bodily descriptions – that the jumbled half-sentences that leap from the physical sensations to the emotional reactions to the eventual verbalisation seems the very description of how the brain works. While each of the pair intends this to be a one time thing, when their paths cross again by accident (and eventually again by her intent), a relationship of sorts is formed, and it is revealed that not only is she missing a father in her life, but he is estranged from a daughter just a year younger than her. How psychological.

                                                                           you know
     it was too late and
             all of a sudden, I was that        became
  a person who has done the worst thing
is that even a person anymore?

Eventually, we also learn that they are both hiding a history of having been molested as children, and while that might have explained her initial fear of sex, for him, it explains twenty years of self-harming behaviour. Over the course of sixty pages, he tells her everything he has never told anyone before, and while on the one hand I appreciated that this story was much more believable and touching than the strainful eye-rolling induced by A Little Life, on the other, because he is just straight talking and talking for pages, the writing is just straight talking and talking; all the charm and inventiveness of McBride's language is suspended for this long stretch (and again near the end when he tells her another story). Happily, story overshared, there is room again for her reaction:

It scares me, I say. I know, I can see. It was a terrible way to behave and way to be in. But looking down on me now, he also looks young and frightened. Together at least in the fear of it. Hedging round the light. Can I touch you? he says then and I cannot think of anything I want more. So go put myself against him. Feel him all around me. I'm sorry, so sorry, he says I can't imagine what it's like for you to hear these things. And what it's like is I've pushed my fingers right through his skin, caught hold of his ribs and must now fall with him. Down through the world while he grasps at everything. But we make the same rattling sound I think. And so keep close together until we are calm. Can let go, finger by finger. Then sit back down. Person looking at person. Like shy and new again.

At one point, he tries to end things by saying that now that he knows that love is possible – that he might even yet marry and have a proper family – he knows that she has a life to live before settling down; that it would be proper for him to set her free. And I like that moment of self-awareness of how icky this affair really is: I can totally buy that he was damaged and felt worthless and she came along just at the right time to give him what he needed, but if he really was healing and ready to grow the hell up, he would do better to challenge himself with a fully grown-ass woman. On the other hand, this story is told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old, and boy do I remember eighteen; and if I had been in love with a thirty-nine-year-old at that age, no one, not even he, could have told me that I didn't know exactly what I was doing. What elevates this story above Nicholas Sparks-type romance is that the reader knows better; the storyline might be soap opera-ish, but we learn exactly what made these characters behave the way they do, and if it appears to be a happy ending, that's merely because McBride decided to end the story on a happy day.

So, while I could have done without the long storytelling sections from him that interrupted the flow, when it was flowing, so were my tears; tears of recognition and identification with truth. And that's my very favourite thing to discover while reading.