Minds and bodies​ are often at odds with each other in Eimear McBride’s novels. In The Lesser Bohemians (2016), the narrator, Eily, gets so anxious giving a blowjob that she makes her actor-boyfriend recite Richard III to get her through it:

Nowisthewinterofourdiscontentmadeglorioussummerbythissonofyork and allthecloudsthatloured upon our house inthedeepbosomofthe ocean     burrrrieeeed nowareourbrowsboundwithvictoriouswreaths …

Characters use their bodies to get out of their heads and their minds to escape their bodies. Masturbating to porn on her hotel TV, the narrator of Strange Hotel (2020) finds herself suddenly ‘seceding from thought’. Sometimes they lose the thread of themselves entirely. In The Lesser Bohemians, Eily’s boyfriend Stephen recalls being off his head in Archway and hallucinating his younger self in the street: ‘That boy, looking beat to shit. After a couple of hours God began to explain. Remember this? Yourself?’ (God lapses into silence when he decides to jump off a roof.) In The City Changes Its Face, which continues the story of Eily and Stephen, there’s a moment when Stephen catches sight of his reflection in a café window and panics at the weird gestures he is making with his hands: ‘He can see that he is mad … He gets so frightened. Tries to stop. But can’t seem to make himself.’

One of McBride’s recurring ideas is how hard it is for people to keep hold of themselves, not turn into versions of their worst influences. In The Lesser Bohemians, during a period of compulsive promiscuity, Stephen has loud sex with a woman in a pub toilet while her young son waits outside with a Coke; his father, he tells Eily later, used to pick up women and make him sit outside the bedroom door or in the front seat of the car. When, at 22, he gets his girlfriend pregnant, he grows terrified that his daughter, Grace, won’t be safe with him, that he’ll do to her a version of what his abusive mother did to him: ‘The fear she was in me and would come out in ways I didn’t notice.’ Physical resemblance seems to confirm the risk. His mother, he knows, is ‘his very spit’; when he sees his own reflection he sees her too. ‘There. Around the eyes and mouth: a troubling likeness.’ It doesn’t help that Grace turns out to be the image of both of them, a ‘facsimile’.

The City Changes Its Face picks up where The Lesser Bohemians left off, in the summer of 1995. (Again, we see the world from Eily’s point of view, so no concessions are made to readers who haven’t read the first book.) Eily is about to turn nineteen and going into her second year of drama school; she and Stephen, who is twenty years older, have left his bedsit in Camden for a bigger, brighter flat down the road. The problem is that two have become three. Grace, for many years absent from her father’s life, is back in it, a tall, messy teenager who shows up periodically, gets drunk and throws up loudly in the next room. The fact that she’s barely two years younger than Eily, who also does things like getting drunk and making scenes, awakens old fears in Stephen about the tendencies that might lurk inside him. During Grace’s first visit, Eily notices that he’s suddenly no longer interested in sex: it’s as if he is ‘finding it hard to tell us apart’. ‘We can be daughters or lovers but definitely not both. So    for safety’s sake    I’d been    sworn off? … That your pulled wires don’t find the wrong connect?’ It’s the memory of him and his mother all over again, the terror of what might happen when you don’t keep certain things separate.

Sex has a structural importance in McBride’s work. A lot has been said about her style – the beaten-up grammar, the sentence fragments, the axed pronouns and relative pronouns, the neologisms and puns, the remarkable descriptions of what it’s like to be drunk or high – but less about the way she puts her novels together. ‘I did not set out to write lots of sex scenes,’ she has said of The Lesser Bohemians. ‘They kept recurring and I realised they were intrinsic to the story of the relationship.’ This is an understatement. Cumulatively, the endless sex is a bit wearying (‘Why can’t anyone in this book be normal?’ I scribbled next to the section in which it emerges that the wealthy older theatre director who takes Stephen in also wants to fuck him). But it has an interesting effect. The sex scenes are so long and so many that in a sense they can’t be called scenes: sex is where the narrative sits, not where it goes from time to time, and the frequency with which it happens makes it less instrumentalised, less likely to be the thing plot hinges on, than sex in novels tends to be. It’s shown as part of people’s lives, as sex is. (In The Lonely Girl, Edna O’Brien, an important influence on McBride, has a character remark that ‘Sex is not some independent thing, it’s part of what people feel for each other.’) Within the general sex-atmosphere, individual episodes move the dial on the relationship. Stephen cheats; Eily cheats; there is a grim rage-filled threesome with her flatmate. When Marianne, Grace’s mother, gets in touch, possibly to take Grace away from him again, Stephen medicates in the usual way: ‘I could really     I could really use that fuck now.’

Sex in The City Changes Its Face is a different thing. It takes place rarely, its absence is discussed, and both having and not having it are complex and anxious-making. Eily wants it and Stephen doesn’t, or feels he shouldn’t, and every tiny aspect of their stalemate, seen through her eyes, acquires seismic significance. Stephen putting on a T-shirt to sleep in during Grace’s visit is ‘this new step – which felt quite like a trip’. (As often in McBride, the language here goes several ways at once – ‘trip’ relates to ‘step’, as in tripping over, but it also makes you think of ‘trap’, and possibly of ‘trip’ in the sense of crazy or trippy.) Later, when Stephen rejects Eily’s overtures with a polite ‘Night then’, it’s as though he’s committed treason: ‘Night night bitch battle body fold and ache. Bloody spurned to the wall by your blanched shoulder blade.’ In the sections of the novel headed ‘Now’, which take us forward sixteen months to the winter of 1996, there are new cracks in the relationship and a lot more damage has been done (something traumatic has happened, which McBride lets us in on bit by bit), but sex, or the lack of it, is still in Eily’s view the thing that explains everything, that could fix it.

The wrongness of her diagnosis becomes clear in the scene in which she hurls – of all things – a jar of piccalilli at Stephen, for his refusal to agree that sex is the problem. ‘The kitchen elaborates itself into objects of malice. Mortars. Trajectories to hit. And within this graspy maelstrom it’s the piccalilli gets it … Doodlebugging the air before hitting the radio.’ This is an absurd description, but it’s supposed to be. Condiment jars aren’t ‘mortars’ and they don’t explode like bombs; the mock-heroic inflations here suggest that something has gone awry with Eily’s sense of perspective, and – since ‘the kitchen elaborates itself’ without her consciously making it do so – she isn’t in control over where her mind goes. Sex is one metric for how a relationship is going, but it can’t be the only one, and it isn’t a panacea. Using it to force a change or a crisis, as Eily does towards the end of the novel when she inveigles Stephen into hurting her in bed, instrumentalises it, does away with its pleasurable ordinariness. Caught in her trap, Stephen looks, she thinks, ‘like a boy put to work in some vast machine’.

The two of them spend large parts of the book not talking to one another, or trying to talk but not saying much. (McBride has a good ear for the inconsequential, nothingy things people say when they’re in a relationship: ‘No     I suppose not’; ‘Probably fine’; ‘Nothing really’.) In place of communication, there are attempts at decoding. ‘My eye goes through him for his state of mind,’ Eily says, aware that he’s ‘gauging’ her in the same way when he thinks she can’t see. ‘How is she? Fine. Or she seems okay. Good. Tick. Now? Fine. Good. Tick again.’ Immersed in her point of view, the narrative tracks her thinking as if in real time, as she calibrates and recalibrates, makes tiny continuous adjustments. She has two internal voices: as well as her narrative voice, the one she uses to describe what’s happening or how she’s feeling, there is another, given in smaller type, which cuts across the first – self-editing, calling bullshit, saying things she wouldn’t admit to out loud. It’s the one that insists that everything she’s done in her life has been a choice: ‘Unable unwilling? to look at myself as a     person     who might.    have made a mistake? A person who might     have misread herself?’

The little voice comes into its own when Eily starts to worry that she might be pregnant. ‘You can’t just think this one away,’ it tells her. But instead she looks over at what Stephen is doing, with his marked-up copy of Doctor Faustus:

Saw, when I glanced up, you making a note by some line you     didn’t think worked? And who would you discuss that with? Christopher Marlowe except What if I’m pregnant? he died centuries ago. I know that but what if I am? Pub fight in Deptford, I’m fairly certain. I’m just daring myself aren’t I? To imagine it’s true? Stabbed through the eye. Except     I am a body too.

General knowledge is good for a lot of things, including keeping unwanted truths at the door. Here, voluntary and involuntary lines of thought flicker over and under one another. Conjunctions – ‘except’, ‘but’ – act like hinges, or railway points, allowing one track to switch unexpectedly into the other. Bit by bit, the ‘official’ track – what exactly happened to Marlowe? – starts colliding with, or being taken over by, the unofficial one, the secret that only Eily knows about herself. ‘Except    I am a body too.’

The mixing here – of voice, tone, time, place, London in the 1590s and London in the 1990s – is part of the cognitive effect. (Somehow the phrase ‘pub fight’ seems more in the realm of Stephen and Eily’s grungy locals than Marlowe’s Elizabethan tavern.) It captures the associative, multivocal way people think, as well as the particular way Eily does. Reaching for Marlowe as a means of distraction comes naturally to her: she is a reader (‘Customarily speaking, we’re for fucking and books,’ she tells us early on), and both this novel and The Lesser Bohemians are peppered with careless, near automatic allusions to the sorts of thing she reads and acts in. Her apprehensive wait in bed for Stephen one night takes on the shades of Faustus’s final, doomed soliloquy: ‘It took you an age, but The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike!’ Out in Soho, blind drunk, a friend’s cheating boyfriend gets a punchy Shakespearean toast: ‘To his clap and her burning pants. A pox on his penis. Minimus! Egg! Dwarf!’ (This combines insults from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth, as well as recalling the friend’s late-night food of choice: ‘I am chips and she’s pickled egg.’) In The Lesser Bohemians, three dramatists bear awkward witness to Eily and Stephen’s first snog: ‘I’ll just clear these plates. Goodbye dried mince. May the kissing go better for the Pinter beneath it. Will it? Orange peel on Valle-Inclán. What might have been a plaster on Howard Brenton.’

In A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013), McBride’s first novel, the narrator and her friend bunk off school and read Milton, but Milton doesn’t get into the text: the girl’s language seems to come from within, rather than without, as personal and self-identifying as a birthmark. The Lesser Bohemians, by contrast, opens itself up to the world: it makes storytelling – being able to talk to someone else, to draw on a shared language – its subject. In the middle of the novel, there’s an extended set piece in which Stephen lets Eily in on the awful secrets of his past. At the end, his mother – from beyond the grave – gives her side of the story, reported via Stephen’s stepfather and his ex-girlfriend. The City Changes Its Face is just as self-reflexive. McBride has said that her early training in method acting (she was a student at Drama Centre London in the 1990s) continues to shape her way of inhabiting her narrators: ‘Repurposing that same intimate, closed-circuit perspective has become the method’s real legacy for me.’ But the most interesting thing about her new novel is its exposed circuitry, the attention it pays to its workings and to the affordances of form more generally.

At its heart, in the place Stephen’s story occupies in The Lesser Bohemians, is an eighty-page ekphrasis, a frame-by-frame description by Eily of the film Stephen has made about his childhood and brutal early years in London. The film, in her rendering of it, is rough-going but transfiguring, even beautiful, making shooting up look like artistry:

INTERIOR. PUBLIC TOILET. DAY. The young man’s long fingered hands. Bluish for human skin but, regardless, elegant. Carefully laying instruments out like place settings and plates. Except a syringe – not soup spoon. Matches. Shoelace. And the actual spoon, from no desirable set, with its handle already bent out of shape. His accompanying monologue, as impassive as its logic, is strange and sends grave walking shivers down my spine.

Ekphrases are by nature self-reflexive. (It’s difficult, scrutinising the form of something, not to reflect on the shape of the thing you’re making.) But this one is especially so, because its content is familiar to us – a story hashed out in Stephen’s monologue in The Lesser Bohemians, then, more obliquely, in Strange Hotel, in which the unnamed narrator, likely Eily, remembers a night long ago that remains her emotional ‘touchstone’: ‘A man told me a story, and it wasn’t just a story, and he thought it would make me run.’ So what matters here isn’t what, but how. Grace, watching the cut with Eily and her father, doesn’t know the half of it and sits with her hands over her mouth in horror; Eily, to whom none of it is new, is interested in the ‘nuts and bolts’, the filmmaker’s bag of tricks. Everything can be analysed: the way the camera cuts away sometimes to leave certain things unseen, only implied; the way the pattern of its attention makes some characters sympathetic and others not; the fact that you can get the best out of a child actor by promising him Opal Fruits; the way an ordinary run-down house can be made to seem the pit of hell. (‘INTERIOR. DERELICT HOUSE ENTRANCE HALL. NIGHT. This place born for filming and the camera loves it. Broke glass. Ivied woodwork. Floors Tarkovsky wet.’) The film’s strategies, laid bare, illuminate the similar tricks the novel plays: its flashbacks and flashforwards, its rapid cuts between scenes, the way it self-consciously juxtaposes episodes that comment on one another.

There’s no cynicism here, just technique. Art and life have to be honest, McBride suggests, about how they use each other. (In The Lesser Bohemians, Stephen breaks up with Eily and all the pain of it goes into her Juliet: ‘Much better, the Director says at the end You’ve not wasted your weekend.’) What Stephen wants more than anything, Eily realises, is to be able to parse his experience, then slough it off – ‘escape from the life of being looked at, into the one of being an eye’. It turns out that the same need is in her too: to ‘peel’, ‘shed’, step out from. Anything can be beautiful, if you look at it from the right angle. Lots of things, despite themselves, can be funny. At a dark moment in the film, Stephen’s character gets chatting to the owner of a greasy spoon who functions a bit like the gravedigger in Hamlet (‘“I lived down south a while myself.” “Yeah? Where was that?” “Morden”’). The facts are ‘unalterable’, but getting outside of and on top of them makes all the difference. After A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing was published, McBride said that her writing was about ‘stripping away layers of artifice’, ‘not accepting the accepted impurities of form’. Now, to satisfying effect, she seems intent on letting the impurities back in.