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Lesser Bohemians (2016). These radically
experimental books both won major
awards, though they weren’t to everyone’s
taste.
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing – about an
Irish girl’s relationship with her disabled
brother and religious mother and her
own sexuality – was written in visceral,
fragmented, stream-of-consciousness-style
prose that perforated the conventional
sentence. The Lesser Bohemians – about a
drama-school student who embarks on
a turbulent love affair – used somewhat
more conventional sentences, but also,
for instance, switched up some nouns
and verbs. You could call them post-post-
modernist fiction, to coin a term.
McBride’s new novel, Strange Hotel,
although still experimental in style,
moves a little closer to a “normal” nar-
rative form. We meet an unnamed,
40-something woman as she stays
in hotel rooms in Prague, Oslo, Avignon,
Austin and Auckland. Each room so much
resembles the others – not necessarily in
appearance, but in what happens there –
that it feels as if she’s staying in the one
place. We don’t see her venture outside,
and never see her travelling.
I
n a way, nothing happens, but in
another way, a lot is going on, as we’re
privy to this woman’s thoughts. She has
what she calls “inverted chats” with her-
self, full of digressions that play out like
our thoughts do when we can’t sleep or
are trying to meditate. She procrastinates
about everything, “paralysing her every
impulse to action with arguments she
can neither win nor lose”. It’s almost as
though she’s keeping herself hostage. Per-
haps she’s focusing on each thought and
action to avoid thinking about the past or
the future. Perhaps something major has
already happened to her.
The book may sound impenetrable,
claustrophobic and perhaps self-indulgent,
but McBride’s writing captivates to the
point that what was or wasn’t happen-
ing didn’t particularly matter. Because, as
Irish writer Anne Enright puts it, McBride
writes “truth-spilling, uncompromising
and brilliant prose”.
Certainly she makes the reader work
hard. There are
more questions than
answers, but if you’re
okay with a jigsaw,
it’s worth trying
to piece this one
together. l
STRANGE HOTEL, by
Eimear McBride (Allen
& Unwin, $32.99)
both admiration and hatred, advocates
for an end to the fighting and to the
occupation.
M
cCann writes, assembles and
arranges apparently uncon-
nected
but always precisely
and cleverly placed
snippets – of history,
information about the
habits and flight paths
of birds, evocations
of culture, instances
of cruelty, shared
humanity and gen-
erosity – that
echo and link and combine. Eve-
rything matters. Everything
inexorably contributes to a
gripping and immensely
readable whole. It is invidi-
ous, perhaps, to mention
individual examples, but
consider Aramin’s ini-
tially disbelieving but
horrified discovery of
the Holocaust while
watching TV in jail.
Or the fact that, when more than 700,000
Palestinians fled or were evicted from
their homes in 1948, hundreds went to
South America, where many died on long
journeys in search of work. When their
bodies were found years later, on a string
at the neck or wrist of
several skeletons was
“the key belonging to
the door of a house
in what had become,
now, Israel”.
Occasionally,
McCann’s style is a
little self-conscious,
but almost always it
is clear, controlled
and often arresting. He takes a huge
risk subverting what we may think of
as a novel; he has made something that
shouldn’t, and easily couldn’t, work suc-
ceed triumphantly.
If ever there were
an argument for the
power of fiction, for the
strength and reach of
its voice, Apeirogon is it.
Read it, weep, under-
stand – and hope. l
APEIROGON, by Colum
McCann (Bloomsbury,
$32.99)
McCann has subverted
what we may think
of as a novel; he has
made something that
shouldn’t, and easily
couldn’t, work succeed
triumphantly.
As Anne Enright puts it,
McBride writes “truth-
spilling, uncompromising
and brilliant prose”.
Colum McCann:
stylistically risky.
Eimear McBride: Strange Hotel is less
experimental than her earlier works.