One of my first thoughts about this book was – I pity anyone
who had to edit it. The style is unique; it uses short sentences, non-standard
grammar and spelling, a kind of stream of consciousness that attempts to express
the fractured nature of the girl – and then young woman – at the centre of the
narrative.
Also, there are no names in the book; we never learn what
the protagonist is called though her experience is all we are given. These
techniques give a kind of intensity to the narrative, but also alienate the
reader a little, forcing us to look at the world we are given in a very
different way to other novels – it becomes a little dreamlike and at times hallucinatory.
It is often impossible to know if the dialogue that we hear
is only in the main character’s head or if it is really spoken, and there are
parts where it is impossible to say exactly what is going on. It owes something
to Joyce but probably more to Beckett’s novels; this kind of intense internality
that attempts to let us into a disturbed, fractured human mind and to see what
is going on from the inside.
The cast is minimal – a girl, growing up in rural Ireland,
her brother who had a brain tumour as a baby and who is still affected by it,
her judgmental, pious mother and an uncle who abuses her. There are some incidental
characters that pop up, but no one of any real significance.
The plot is not exactly complex either. The girl grows up
with her older brother who is teased and bullied in school. She is abused as a thirteen
year old, and becomes promiscuous and wild. She finally escapes to the big city
– Dublin? – to university, where things don’t really improve for her. She starts
a relationship with the uncle who raped her as a thirteen year old, engages in
some risky sexual behaviour, then her brother’s tumour returns and she has to
deal with his slow decline and her mother’s growing resentment.
Not exactly a barrel of laughs. The more I read of this book,
the more it reminded me of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel from 2015, A Little Life. In
that book, the main character is abused by almost everyone he meets, and
endures such extremes of horror and deprivation that it is at times hard to
read.
In A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the central character – for
practically the whole novel – is immersed in self-hatred, degradation,
self-harm, guilt, depression, abuse, grief and loss. It is a litany of sadness
and despair with no chink of light or touch of humour. The misery is relentless
and only grows towards the end, building to the almost inevitable conclusion
(similar to the conclusion in A Little Life).
The writing is, at times, powerful and moving, but the utter
unforgiving relentlessness of the horror and gloom is hard to take, and hard to
take seriously, in fact. If a male writer put his female protagonist through what
Eimear McBride inflicts on her main character, he would be asked what drove him
to want to punish her so badly and accusations of misogyny would abound. The
writer seems almost to take a kind of glee in ramping up the abasement and degradation
of her heroine and depriving her of any redeeming element in her life, any joy,
consolation or safety.
The novel has won, or been nominated for, multiple prizes,
so misery lit is obviously appreciated by literary judges. The truth though, is
that it is an intermittently impressive but very flawed book, seemingly concerned
only with transmitting to the reader the slow disintegration of a human being,
a life without solace, hope or growth.
