Eimear McBride’s much-anticipated second novel The Lesser Bohemians tells of the highly sexualised relationship between an 18-year old female student of acting and an older, male actor. It’s a bruising, challenging tale, set in 1990s London and narrated by the female protagonist in a stream-of-consciousness mode.
McBride’s latest opus has arrived to decidedly mixed reviews – a kind of petulant scorn and corrosive dismissal from Private Eye; caustic disdain from The Sunday Times; glowing praise from The Guardian/Observer in separate assessments, while evincing a kind of patient enthusiasm from The Irish Times. Factor in too the largely positive vibes from The London Review of Books and McBride has certainly done well in terms of column inches. These pages which you now read will also feature a review in the very near future.
Whatever about the reviews and what people think about the book, 38-year old McBride has certainly tried to tell her story differently, eschewing normal syntactical conventions with sentences such as the following: So sit we. Separate. Years apart while the night turns itself, in his forty watt, into waste and into past.
Born in Liverpool, the author grew up in County Sligo. She lives in Norwich with her husband William Galinsky, who works as a theatre director in that city, in fact the reason why she lives there. The couple have a daughter Éadaoin, and husband and daughter are thanked in the acknowledgments.
The Lesser Bohemians tells of the highly-sexualised relationship between an 18-year old female student of acting and an older, male actor in 1990s London. Trauma is the dominant note, trauma sounding its trumpet blast from the past, the volume of its noise ever increasing as dark secrets involving the actor himself, and the actor’s former partner and daughter come to light.
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Why write about sexuality, if, as she has said, it is difficult to do so? “Because I think it is such a huge part of life, of everyone’s life, whether they are very sexual, or they aren’t, " she replies. "Sexuality is a huge part of who you are and I think it’s not well served, particularly female sexuality is not well served by literature.
"I think literature is full of terrible sex writing and it was interesting to try and write about sex in a way that was more meaningful, that was still graphic, but that was more about expressing what sexual experience really is, rather than just bodies doing things. It’s about people and who they are, and you can learn a lot about character when you write those kinds of scenes, if you write them well.”
The author’s fractured, yet curiously vivid prose operates in the shadow of the James Joyce who wrote Ulysses. “Joyce is obviously a huge influence on me, “ says Eimear. “It was reading Ulysses which showed me that you could do anything you wanted with the form and that you could do anything you wanted with language.
“That’s if you had the virtuosity and all of the chutzpah to carry it off – more chutzpah than virtuosity perhaps, “ she laughs. “But that’s kind of where the influence ends with Joyce. I think there are comparisons, but actually we’re not after the same thing at all.”
She has also `done’ - to use her own phrase - Joyce’s profoundly demanding Finnegan’s Wake. “It’s a book I’m increasingly interested in, I think it’s underrated. People are afraid of it and I think it’s a book best enjoyed if you leave as many of your preconceptions behind as possible and just try to read it with a whole different part of yourself. Joyce wrote it for a different part of the self, so maybe that’s why it’s better to try and read it from a different part of yourself as well.”
Most novelists opt to tell a novel in straight prose, as one can concentrate on the dynamics of the story and move it forward with relative ease. Our hyper-saturated televisual age too may be making fiction be more like what we watch on TV. It would be a brave publisher who would countenance any kind of daring experimentation from a novice fiction writer. However, McBride is a kind of maverick, she can write what she writes, firstly because she clearly wants to, but perhaps she also has a certain freedom because of the exceptional success of her first novel, A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing. The novel won a host of prizes and was one of the most critically-acclaimed novels of 2014.
The Lesser Bohemians is, as she sees it, two ways of telling the story. “There are two main characters and the young girl's story is really told in an internal, modernist monologue. The older actor tells his story in a sort of nineteenth century monologue, where what you have is what he says.
“You don’t get to see inside of him, whereas you see most of the story from inside of her, and how she reacts and responds. And so it was interesting to try and weld those two very different ways of telling a story together and see how they influenced each other.”
She is clearly relieved that the book is finally out there. “Yea, I’m delighted,“she says. “It was a long time in the writing, so it’s great to finally be here.”
The Lesser Bohemians is published by Faber
