Tinteán

A Book Review by Frances Devlin-Glass

Eimear McBride, The City Changes its Face, Faber, London, 2025.
RRP: GBP18  for hb; also available as eBook.
ISBN: 9780571384211

The City Changes its Face is an extraordinary, risk-taking novel, dealing as it does with Camden (London) when it was grunge-ily Bohemian in the 1990s, a drug and sex (no rock’n’roll) mecca for the young. Told from the vantage point of a young 20-year-old drama student, Eily, finding a tumultuous way into a writing future, and obsessively in love with a fellow-actor, Stephen, who is 20 years her senior. 

What glues the two main characters together is Eily’s obsessive needy sex-hunger (how to explain this? will her back-story be told in the sequel?), her liberated delight in her own body and his, and exploring their sexuality. Eimear McBride takes the reader on a slow journey into the pathologies that underpin their sexual needs, which is only revealed on re-reading. Each of the main protagonists comes into the relationship with a lot of historical baggage, and their needs clash violently: she is initially (possibly) jealous of Stephen’s estranged daughter, Grace, only a couple of years younger than herself, or if not that, certainly wary of his solicitude for the adult child and the impact it may have on her own sexual ‘possession’ of Stephen. Although he basks in her abject sexual dependence, he has a very different and engrossing project of his own: writing and directing a film about his own drug-dependence and  intergenerational sexual abuse which unpacks his past and serves the useful purpose of distancing him from it. This novel, like her first, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing(2013), tackles dangerous subjects – incest, drugs, sex and violence – and takes terrible risks with her readership. She had trouble finding a publisher for her first and very successful novel, with publishers fearing actual censorship, or concerned about putting off the escapist reader who is frustrated by difficult writing and subject-matter. McBride is fearless and in this novel tackles the same kinds of issues, but in a different key and uses an array of different literary techniques.

This novel is a sequel to one I’ve not yet read, The Lesser Bohemians, and if you’re worried whether or not it stands alone, the answer is an emphatic yes. In fact, I fear filling in that reading gap may prove disappointing, as I felt so alienated by the slow first third of the novel. It wasn’t until I hit the filmscript (occupying the middle third of the novel) that I was fully reconciled to this novel and began to thoroughly engage with what feels like an immersive mixed-media event. Let me try to explain.  I found the first third which sets up the urgent sexual dynamic between Eily and Stephen not sufficiently pacy; in retrospect, Eimear McBride sets up a lot of the backstory which will play out richly in the filmscript, which is short on dialogue, but strong on registering symbolic cityscapes and facial and gestural subtleties. It’s set up in the novel as a three-way previewing of the film, with discussion, often about incidental emotional effects like the music score, which takes some of the heat out of the fierce emotional content of the film. More significantly, the film functions as an exposé, mainly for Grace’s benefit, of why Grace’s mother struck out on her own with their child relocating to Vancouver, and of Stephen’s very damaged psyche. His mother had not been parented by her father, and Stephen as a child is vulnerable to both. The film is a scarifying, no-holds-barred, examination of the degradation to which drugs reduce him as a young adult, the reasons for his recourse to them, and his gradual release from their hold. It is harrowing, and the almost-adult daughter’s response amps up the electricity.

The novel draws attention to its writing and genre continually. In between writing her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) and her fourth novel, The City Changes its Face (2025), are two more novels, a short film script (2023) and a second full-length filmscript (in preview and seeking production), an adaptation for theatre of her first novel, and some critical works. It is an impressive array of ‘publications’ in different media by a writer who clearly labours over her writing. I mention the filmscripts because, embedded in The City Changes its Face is an impressive filmscript which reads like a playscript or filmscript, but especially the latter as it is significantly light on dialogue (compared with its flanking episodes). Both the writer’s and Eily’s background consists of a stint at Drama School in London, so one has to assume she’s familiar with both scripts and how thespians  use their physicality to embody strong emotions. This mix of life-experiences and the strategies she can draw on create contrasting textures and depth in the novel. Multi-genre novels have become more familiar since Joyce, and I admired Eimear McBride’s adroitness in exploiting the possibilities of the shifts from interior monologue (alternating with a lot of truncated dialogue) to a very different mode of discourse in which she registers in language emotional responses visually and physically on the screen.

How Eimear McBride navigates intimacy is fascinating. She’s learnt the uses of free indirect discourse for registering both the fissures between what is said socially and what is inward and sometimes inexplicit, and for exposing contradictoriness within the character’s psyche, and also for allowing the space for the reader to be critical of the character created. My critical impulses were on high alert early in the novel: why was this young woman so abjectly throwing herself at this man? And nearly missing him with a full bottle of piccalilly (which he especially enjoys)? How could she ask the hard questions, but also simultaneously be reserved and withhold? How to navigate the unsayable and unthinkable? Eily’s trajectory is from teenage certitude into more adult doubt, and realising her failure to ‘own what I really wanted. And that this was the place I was probably going to from the moment I chose to hide’ (eBook, p.307).

Many of her misgivings make good use of a smaller font, which is the first time I’ve noticed this typographical strategy made available by computers from the 1980s being used, along with gaps between words and something that looks like concrete poetry on the page.  It’s also fascinating to watch the writer’s  playful games with grammar and parts of speech (as well as McBride, Eily is, unbeknownst to herself, turning herself into a writer). The passages of dialogue and unspoken thought are often unfinished, or change direction, or falter, and yet McBride’s intention is rarely opaque. This is self-conscious writing, often poetic, and yet much more functional and approachable than A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. For me, the difference lies in her interest in the dynamics of the heterosexual and woman-to-woman relationships and in the way the alliances between the characters morph and mutate. When she realises that both Grace and Stephen are self-generating in a way she is not, Eily’s introspection and previously unacknowledged angst leads her productively into the possibility of difficult change: 

…in that long mirror of [Stephen], I glimpsed the start of running in me. A want for other solutions to my faulty wiring. … Still, I kept to the leaky safety of was and had. Unable unwilling? to look at myself as      a person who might      have made a mistake?  A person who might      have misread herself?  A person       whose mind was suddenly running far faster than the place she was in. Who had realised it could run as fast as yours      and would love it to take its chances out in the originating world but if I did      who would I then be? (p.274)

The gaps between words replicate Eimear McBride’s narrative manoeuvres and Eily’s uncertainties and faltering progress to mature self-consciousness. The passages in italics are in the text in a tiny font to register their unspoken innerness. Until this point in the narrative, it is Stephen whose deficits are the focus of Eily’s attention, not her own. It’s a standpoint from which the abjectness that so alarmed and disappointed me as a card-carrying feminist earlier in the novel can be re-evaluated. And it is clear that McBride is prepared to make due allowance for the presumptuous certainties of the adolescent brain.

This woman is a transgressive writer in the best literary traditions. Nouns, verbs, grammar prove mutable in Eimear McBride’s hands:  characters are described as having ‘evening’d across’ (p.282); as giving the ‘spareliest’ of  nods (p.6); as moving awkwardly, ‘the frozen lank of him cutting the corner to vanish off into our room’ (p.7) to get dry and warm; and a streetlight as ‘maurad[ing] where it will beyond the pane’ (p.70); and couples ‘outwait’ one another to tackle a pile of dish-washing (she can be funny) (p.13) and when unsure of what there is to eat, they linger by the fridge ‘on a countdown to cheese’ (p.16).  Sentences are often unfinished, but utterly interpretable, as in this dialogue between Eily and Stephen: 

Really       don’t worry     it doesn’t help.

If you promise me that you

I promise      all right?

Because I can’t let the end of that sentence arrive. Swallow. Swallow. Right down to dry.

Okay then, love      I’ll try.

    You really don’t need to worry, Stephen      I swear.

He doesn’t believe me, but enough’s been said for his fingers to reopen. To relax. To dive back into action, fast, and gather all edibles in one sticky salvage. Then that sandwich’s hour has come. (pp19-20)

Eimear McBride has a genius for energising the banal and quotidian.

The triumph of this book is a familiar one while being at the same time a new take on that familiarity. What Eily admires in Stephen’s representation of the grunge scene that made him, the reader can in turn admire in McBride: her willingness to

… make beauty and life from all the fuck-ups. Mine. People’s.  Whatever interested me. Never find myself full of thought, but at a loss, and then discover intention through work and more fuck-ups and work until       a thing got made. Right from the bones up. The whole of its skin. Not just to imagine mlyself inside, interpreting. Being its face or constructing its voice. But making it all, from the start.
No.
Too much risk in those thoughts and what dismantling they’d mean. (p.267).

The writing is also extraordinary. Much has been made of McBride’s debt to Joyce, and this novel ends by invoking of the ending of his most famous short story, ‘The Dead’, except that it mobilises a female narrative voice, and a springtime resurgence. It came as a bit of an ambush on a first read, but seemed much more prepared for on a second, so I was happier to be persuaded of the daring, feisty, feminist chutzpah of Ms McBride. I recommend the novel strongly.

Frances Devlin-Glass

Frances is a member of the Tinteán editorial collective. She is proud to call herself a Joycean and a feminist, and has taught Literature since her late teens.