WORDS Maria Hagan
Eimear McBride’s Goldsmith prize-winning novel A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing tells the heartbreaking story of a girl’s nightmarish passage from childhood to adulthood. The novel opens in a mother’s consciousness, but rapidly switches to her daughter’s on the very day of her birth. The five part novel traces the protagonist’s familial and sexual experiences in the face of a woeful upbringing. Faceless, nameless characters flit through her life like relentless spectres.
As a child, the protagonist’s brother is affected by a brain tumour whose potential return looms over the novel. A haunting sense of paternal absence, and a mother’s devotion to a remorseless God trickle down to create an isolating home-space in which brother and sister battle to pull together. A hole emerges in the protagonist’s life, which she bravely struggles to compensate for. The reader is faced with a heart-wrenching depiction of promiscuity becoming the only escape from an oppressive family and community.
Although character and place names remain a mystery to the reader, the novel is very much anchored in Ireland. Passages in Irish, descriptions of landscape, and a depiction of religious guilt as having an overarching hold over the family give a strong sense of the setting. The image of Ireland that is given is harrowing and brutally honest. It stimulates a strong critical response in the reader.
McBride’s style is highly experimental. Her use of unfinished sentences, repetition, and broken expression prove extremely successful in mirroring the protagonist’s interior struggle. Moments of breakdown punctuated by ones of stability are paralleled by fluctuations in the extent of the brokenness of the language that translates them. At first the novel may seem a challenge to read, but the rhythm of the broken prose soon reveals itself as necessary to its subject and enthralling to the reader.
The read is a difficult one, for both its style and unsettling themes. This difficulty, however, is what makes for its excellence. The adventurous reader will relish in its ground-breaking originality. McBride’s experimental talent was recognised earlier this year when she was awarded the Goldsmith Award. She is the deserving winner of the very first edition of this award that recognises British and Irish writers for fiction that “opens up new possibilities for the novel form”.
Born in London to Irish parents, McBride was brought up in county Sligo. A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing is a particular asset to the contemporary Irish canon: since its release her writing has incessantly been described as following in the footsteps of James Joyce. Indeed in addressing recognisably problematic Irish themes of religion and sexuality, McBride casts taboos aside, giving the powerful impression of filling a gap in current Irish fiction.