The Lesser Bohemians (2016)
Why this one?
I bought McBride’s new one, The City Changes Its Face, without clocking that it’s a sequel. I therefore had to read this one first.
Eimear McBride (1976- ; active 2013- ), was born in Liverpool, England to Irish parents. She moved with them back to Ireland at the age of three, spending time in Tubercurry, Sligo and Mayo. She began writing as a young child, and moved to London aged 17 to attend The Drama Centre, but decided after graduating that she had no interest in becoming an actress.
It took her nine years to find a publisher for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, her first novel, and she had already completed much of her second during this long search for a publisher. She had also moved to Norwich, England, where her husband Wiliam Galinsky was running an arts festival. A chance conversation between Galinsky and Henry Layte, owner of the Book Hive bookshop in Norwich, finally led to A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing being published, as the second release on Layte’s newly formed small independent press, Galley Beggar.
The book was a massive critical success, first taking the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that “breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form” (beating fellow shortlisted books by the likes of Ali Smith and David Peace), before taking the 2014 Women’s Prize and receiving a wealth of other awards and nominations.
Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (2016) was published by Faber and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize as well seeing her shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize again, and longlisted for the 2017 Women’s Prize (won by a hugely inferior book, in my humble opinion). Her third novel, Strange Hotel, was published in 2020. The City Changes Its Face, a sequel to The Lesser Bohemians, was published early in 2025.
Thoughts, etc.
The Lesser Bohemians is told from the perspective of Eily, and 18-year-old Irish woman, newly registered at a London drama school. As she settles in to her new life in 1990s Camden Town, she attracts the attention of Stephen, an actor of some renown in his late thirties. They begin an intense, passionate and often destructively turbulent relationship. Initially, it seems like the focus may be on the imbalance of power in their age difference, and their are certainly aspects of that, but ultimately the story develops in much more complex ways as each reveals details of their traumatic past, which in sharing binds them ever closer together.
Like McBride’s debut, it’s somewhat linguistically experimental, with pull quotes all over it giving comparison to Joyce, Beckett and the like. These are valid in some senses, but shouldn’t be taken to imply any kind of wilful complexity or high modernist structuring. Language in McBride’s hands isn’t being modified in the service of some elaborately wrought purpose, but rather just to accurately represent the inner thoughts of her protagonists. It succeeds brilliantly in that objective, adding pace and sparkle to her writing and reflecting the often contradictory impulses of a woman of Eily’s age and in her position, a mind constantly in flux while adapting to new realities, coping with old traumas and acclimatising to the noise and intensity of student life in London. I found the language here also entertainingly playful, adding a touch of lightness and wonder to often heavy subject matter. I’m not usually one for quoting sections of books, but this one is full of wonderful moments, the below just a small extract from a night out, brilliantly described:
”We are installed. We are impinted. Somewhere in the West End. She has a brief whimper, then the real drinking begins. […] Come on, she hisses, hours later - hammered completely and fuckeringly now. Staggering brothelly-haired outside. In the mucklight, the starlight, we are on the town.”
It continues on, for several pages, gathering pace and reflecting increased drunkenness and perfectly capturing a mood, a time of life, and its location.
One of the things that absolutely hooked me on this one was its sense of time and place. Mid-90s London, and Camden in particular, already has a near-mythical pull on my imagination, reflecting as it does a time when I was in my early teens, cooped up in the middle of nowhere, reading the inky music weeklies and dreaming of exactly this time and place. By the time I got there (in and out, only occasionally) in the early 2000s, it was already becoming a different place, so while some of the books descriptions converge with aspects of my real memories of half a decade later, it’s made even more captivating by bringing to life that lost reality in a way that aligns so remarkably with my imagined conceptions of that place and time.
Keen music and cultural historians will note that the book’s action takes place slap bang in the epicentre of the ‘Britpop’ scene, at its absolute peak, but the book cannily swerves any representation of colourful cliches that have passed into the selective cultural memory of that point in time. Instead, in keeping with the darkness of the book’s storytelling, when its characters brush up against the music of the era, it’s very much the darker side of what was going on at the time - music listened to in dark rooms by tortured souls. Stephen offers a listen to Nick Cave’s baroque-goth masterpiece Let Love In; later a copy of Suede’s Britpop-era but resolutely anti-Britpop-styled Dog Man Star is used as an aid to drug consumption. Small details in a rich tapestry of a book, but ones that add immeasurable value to a certified nerd of 90’s music like myself!
Back to the main thrust of this, then: It’s not all sex (there’s a lot of it though, graphically detailed), drugs (somewhat less, though plenty of booze) and rock’n’roll (see above). There’s a huge amount more going on here, and for those who’ve yet to read this or its sequel, I’d rather not give the whole story away. Safe to say that what begins as a turbulent relationship between a sex-addicted quasi-Withnail and a very teenage teenager begins to acquire much more depth than that initially implies. There’s a hefty section late into the novel, taking up more than fifty pages, in which we learn about Stephen’s brutally awful backstory that makes for truly difficult reading, but is essential to understanding everything that comes before and after. It’s material that rivals the likes of A Little Life in the levels of outrage, disbelief and heartache induced by reading it. But I count it worthwhile, even as I had to pause multiple times in this section to make it through.
In Eily it also has a compelling central character. One who we potentially initially assume to be a kind of victim in her relationship with Stephen, given the age and power imbalance and the initial lack of explanation for his unpredictable behaviour. However, she turns out to be a far more complex character - very far from perfect but equally strong-willed, smart, and very much in control of her own destiny and decisions. Stephen as a character is similarly complex. Both during the events of the book and in his more recent past, he shows pretty reprehensible characteristics, but our growth in understanding of his past and how he too has been dramatically wronged on multiple occasions by those closest to him, very much increases our sympathy for him and again leaves us with a rounded and complex character to invest in. The other characters in the book are largely secondary, a supporting cast to the rich melodrama unfolding between the two central lovers, but even here there’s quality - Eily’s ‘Flatmate’ is a reliable source of humour and (at least initially) youthful contrast to Stephen’s brooding maturity.
Overall, I thought this was a pretty stunning book, every bit as impressive as her debut. It has light and (significant) shade; a brilliantly evoked sense of place and time and attendant atmospherics; a wonderful sense of linguistic playfulness; and a deep, dark heart that threatens to overwhelm everything but is kept masterfully in check and wrapped up in a way that leaves a note of hopefulness. In my view, it’s so perfectly closed off that I am feeling hugely apprehensive in broaching its sequel. While I am excited to revisit its characters, I’m left fearful for its potential to disturb the incredibly satisfying equilibrium that this book has managed to achieve. I shall soon see…
Score
9.5
I think I enjoy her prose as much as that of anyone writing today, and the general vibe of this one was right up my street. A difficult read in places, but a rich and rewarding one.
Next up
The City Changes Its Face, of course…
