Oh, my emotions. My mixed emotions. My emotions mixed with dread. My dread that she wouldn't stop. Her not stopping. Stopping me from wanting to stop. And who was I when I read this book? "The starting point was the quote from James Joyce: ‘One great part of human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.’ " Eimear McBride. In wishing to extend the possibilities of language - the extra meaning that can be gleaned when you force words against each other in unfamiliar ways; the way she reduces, like a chef, intensifying the meanings of the words as they thicken and the grammar evaporates - she is wholly successful. There are times when the late teenage girl seems too child-like but at almost every point the language is working to reveal a mind busy attempting to cope with accumulations of confusion, sorrow, abandonment, abuse. At one of the worse moments described - or relayed through a synapse signal from her brain to ours - the language decays to the animal sounds of someone with their mouth covered, all reason extinguished. All reasons extinguished and exhausted. Why? Why Why? are these things happening with apparent complicity?
Here I arrive at the times I disliked, or maybe even hated, this book because of what she puts us through. The descriptions of her brother's advancing illness and eventual death are almost too harrowing to endure and the fractured language - words, tripping over themselves to add confusion, hope, despair - is at its most effective here. When she (the she whose name we never learn) describes her own abject humiliation I became angry with Eimear McBride. There was something just too gratuitous about the repetition of scenes in which she opened herself (in the most literal way) to be used/abused without ever allowing the reader to fully understand her abject complicity. But who was I to understand? I felt deeply uncomfortable reading these scenes. Why should the author, or anyone else, care about my squeamishness, my hatred of physical and sexual violence? She describes it too well. Is that a fault or a virtue? If I put the book down, breath deeply and think: later, later, I'll continue later, is the author achieving exactly what she intended?
Too much of me, but I can only read the novel as me. 'A Girl is a Half-formed Thing' is a rare novel. It returns to a modernism that has been ignored for far too long in Ireland. It may have been the birthplace of Joyce, Beckett, Flann O' Brien, but their achievements and innovations were placed to one side and a relentless realism became the dominant form. Now, by going back to earlier sources McBride has demonstrated magnificently how it is possible to revivify the Irish novel - even one that has as many clichés of Irish life as this one does - by forcing words to resound both within and beyond the bounds of meaning. When she becomes as creative with plot as she is with language she will write an amazing book.
The above review is one I originally posted on Goodreads in 2014. I think I would write a very different type of review now. But, with just a couple of minor changes, I've left it as it was. More recently, I reviewed her novel 'Strange Hotel, here: https://www.drb.ie/essays/time-and-the-woman