"Riley’s pen is a scalpel."
Gwendoline Riley’s last novel First
Love depicted the toxic dynamics of a marriage in merciless, unflinching
detail. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for
multiple other prizes. My Phantoms takes a similarly claustrophobic
focus, this time one that atomizes the relations between a daughter, Bridget,
and her mother, Hen. Riley’s pen is a
scalpel. In many ways she is, I think, a writer’s writer, the pleasures to be
had are moment by moment, sentence by sentence in a high-wire act that is at
times breath-taking in its control and audacity, and not for the faint-hearted.
Hers, or rather her narrator, Bridget’s, is an iciness that burns as her attention
is trained on her parents’ failed marriage, and then on each parent in turn,
with whom, in their different ways, she is shown to be unremittingly at odds.
No one mines disappointment,
unhappiness and essential loneliness better than Riley. She is scabrously
funny, skewering the kinds of banal lacunae in familial relations that are at
once over-familiar and yet frustratingly opaque. No detail is superfluous –
whether the grey leather sofa and matching swivel armchair that come with Hen’s
soulless flat, or the drab clothes she wears: ‘the black linen trousers with a
drawstring waist…bobbled sports socks, moccasin slippers’, observations that
tell us as much about Hen as they do about her daughter’s antipathy. Riley’s
ear for dialogue is razor sharp. ‘Tough titty’ is a characteristic phrase from
Hen, the grimness of having to make do, of expecting disappointment. Although
we are enlisted by the confiding ‘I’ of the narrator to take Bridget’s point of
view and to believe that it is Hen we are trying to puzzle out, in the end we are
far more unsettled by the implications of that narrative voice, what it tells
us about the damage of such a legacy.
My Phantoms is published by Granta.
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