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Eimear McBride_credit_Kat Green
Eimear McBridePhotography by Kat Green

Eimear McBride’s Propulsive Novel Unfolds Over One Night in Mid-90s London

A follow-up of sorts to The Lesser Bohemians, The City Changes Its Face is a forensic examination of sex, trauma and power, set over one rainy night in Camden in 1996. Here, Eimear McBride talks about London, language and Joyce

Lead ImageEimear McBridePhotography by Kat Green

It’s a rare feat to encounter a writer whose work feels both entirely original and timeless, but Eimear McBride is just that. The story goes that, while writing her debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, she taped a James Joyce quote above her desk: “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot." In layman’s terms, Joyce was talking about the ineffable parts of the human condition: fleeting thoughts and physical impulse. Through her terse, propulsive prose, McBride has translated this truth into style – but without sacrificing emotional rigour. Her new novel, The City Changes Its Face, is no exception to this. 

Like Joyce, McBride is a writer who took nine years to publish her first book. When indie publisher Galley Beggar Press finally picked up A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, it was released to near-universal critical acclaim. Following a love affair between drama student Eily and actor Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, McBride’s second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, was likewise lauded by critics and readers. 

Returning to Eily and Stephen in The City Changes Its Face, the story picks up in 1996 on a rainy night in Camden. Stephen’s teenage daughter has reappeared and the heady days of early romance are long gone. Sex, trauma and power are forensically examined, as is London itself. McBride is no stranger to these subjects, but her mercurial insight feels sharper than ever here; no stone is left unturned. “Relied on denial to do the lift,” Eily considers. “So I refuted all misgivings, one disquiet at a time, before turning back to the world.” 

Below, Eimear McBride discusses how The City Changes Its Face came to be.

Katie Tobin: The City Changes Its Face is a follow-up of sorts to The Lesser Bohemians. What compelled you to revisit Eily and Stephen and explore their relationship further?

Eimear McBride: Well, I always knew that there was going to be more. They’re the kind of characters who are most interesting to me; they’re everything that I’m interested in writing about. I’ve always been interested in that idea – what happens next at the end of any story. And, if you get really attached to those characters, you’ll always wonder what happens five or 10 years later. It seemed right to go back to them because they had such a particular relationship, with a huge emotional start. I was interested in exploring what that’s like two years later now the heat has cooled down between them.

KT: Can you speak to the challenges of writing a novel that functions as both a follow-up and a standalone work?

EM: In some ways, it’s straightforward in that it’s standalone because it’s very enclosed in its own time. It’s set across one night but there’s back and forth in memory. It’s hard to know if you’re giving people enough information, if they can understand it all on its own as a standalone. Or do they need to feed back to the first novel? I hope that there’s enough information inside it that it stands on its own.

KT: You’ve said before that James Joyce and Sarah Kane are influences. I also recently read your brilliant foreword to Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. Did they have any bearing on the book? 

EM: I don’t think so. Those kinds of influences were there more at the start of writing for me. Joyce is obviously much more present in something like A Girl, as is Edna in that world as it comes out of that same world as The Country Girls. Linguistically, it’s very indebted to Joyce. But I don’t feel like influences are something that I carry around with me. They’re not very specific anymore. They’re the background noise – the springboard that I make things from. I try to keep them outside the door nowadays.

KT: How does London figure itself in the book? 

EM: I’ve always loved London ever since I I arrived in Camden in the 90s. In The Lesser Bohemians, and also The City Changes Its Face, it was very much about recreating that particular Camden of that time in the mid-90s. In a way, the book is my own romance about that. In The Lesser Bohemians, it’s the kind of city that they run to to escape from the past. It’s a place there where they are sort of saved.

But when you get to The City Changes Its Face, London isn’t necessarily on their side anymore. You sort of wrestle it and embrace it at the same time. There are things that you love, there are things that you hate. There’s so much that’s wonderful about the city culturally, but it’s incredibly expensive and a difficult place to live.

KT: Was 1996 – when the novel is set – a turning point for how you see London in any way?

EM: It wasn’t a turning point as much as it was a big moment culturally. It was when things started to get a bit weird in terms of Britpop. Maybe it was still at that high point of all the amazing culture and fun and drugs and clubs and all that sort of thing. By then, maybe the cultural life of the city was starting to get its claws in at that point, as it does for Eily and Stephen.

“The challenge is always to try and find a new way to create connection, to create surprise, to create shock, to always make it feel fresh” – Eimear McBride

KT: What’s always struck me about your narrative style is how accessible it is. I read a really great description of your style as “literarily anarchic” but “quite focused, stripping sentences to their bare bones”. What is your process for toying with language like this?

EM: Each book has its own demand, so I don’t feel like I’ve got a rule book when it comes to writing. There’s no set way I go about writing a book, thinking, “This is the way language has to work”. Everything gets tailored towards the story in hand and the characters, but I try to think about coming to language from the side. To find a way to make it affect the reader, to make it more fully describe the experience.

When you’re stuck with very generic language and generic ways of describing certain activities or behaviours, and you’re just putting the single words in a new order, it becomes less exciting for the reader. It certainly becomes less exciting to write. The challenge is always to try and find a new way to create connection, to create surprise, to create shock, to always make it feel fresh.

I’m obviously not a plot-driven novelist, it’s all about character. People are so specific, and it’s really important to be very specific when you write. I never write about types of characters. I hate that kind of writing, it’s really tiresome. So, in order to describe each person’s individuality, it’s almost like you have to try and find a specific language to share so that you don’t feel like this is like every other 40-year-old man or every other 20-year-old woman that you’ve ever met. You want to feel that these are people living these lives and behaving in this way. Language has to give the reader access to that feeling, like they are learning about someone and don’t already know everything about them.

KT: There’s a section where the novel itself becomes a script. How was it to experiment with form like this?

EM: Originally, I thought that it would just be Stephen, Eily and Grace in the cinema. I thought that it would jump in and out of various scenes just to show their reaction and how he was coping with their reaction to the film. But when I started, I soon realised that it didn’t feel like it wouldn’t make sense if I didn’t have the whole film in it. I felt like it would be cheating and letting myself off the hook, like it would be less satisfying to write. Maybe less satisfying for the reader, too.

Then this section appeared in The City Changes Its Face, and it was about finding a different kind of language for that. Again, because that can’t be told through all these internal monologues the way the rest of the novel is told, either. It had to be told visually. The rule was that I could only write what they could see; I couldn’t write what they surmised, or the internal monologue of any of the characters. It just had to be what it’s like to watch a film and engage with it, what’s happening inside Eily while she’s watching it and her impressions of what’s going on and the others around her. But it had to obey the rule of being a visual medium.

The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride is published by Faber & Faber, and is out on February 13.