Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people she has come to specialise in – who, once assembled, supply a kind of casebook of rebarbativeness.
To begin with there are the terrible men: – the thespian, Lawrence, for example, who says things like ‘cheery-bye’ and whose decrepit bathroom has ‘a Miss Havisham aspect’; or Chris, the lairy Irish stand-up, by whom, as a besotted teenager, the heroine Laura Miller is cheerlessly seduced.
Then there are the terrible old absconding mums, here represented by the Pernod-swigging Mrs Miller, who, having installed Laura and herself in her own mother’s establishment, retreats to her private living room with instructions that she doesn’t want to hear from anybody unless it’s an absolute emergency. Naturally, the terrible old absconding dads run their wives a close second, with Laura’s father inviting Uncle Owen to sniff his daughter’s armpits and remarking: ‘It’s not just me, is it, that’s a pretty ripe smell?’
Finally, there is Laura, the woman charged with bearing the brunt of all this question-able ancestry: a nervy, watchful type, getting by on irony and caution, making her way through a complicated present while trying to deal with a snake pit of unresolved issues from the past. Symbolism abounds, and one of the chilliest scenes sees Laura with her mother and grandmother on holiday in Dubrovnik admiring the lace-up fabric boots worn by the local female workforce. Pairs are cheaply procured, after which Laura, sporting hers in the park, is informed by a passer-by: ‘Your shoes are shit, you know?’
Advance publicity for the novel dwelt on its roman à clef element, in particular the widely held suspicion that Sequence, a literary magazine that employs Laura’s friend Ed Putnam, is a dead ringer for the Times Literary Supplement when it was edited by Stephen ‘Stig’ Abell. Sure enough, Sequence has an editor named Simon ‘Shove’ Halfpenny, lampooned by his disillusioned staff for filing editorials that begin ‘What is it about dogs?’ and ‘April is the cruellest month, as the poet T.S. Eliot once famously wrote’. Yet most of the literary backdrop turns out to be incidental. A Grub Street satire this is not.
What it is, on the other hand, is a novel about staying the course and coming to terms. Several of the scenes describing Laura’s relationship with the solitary, brooding Putnam – which bookend the longmiddle stretch about her uninviting youth – take place in the latter’s flat. This overlooks a tantalising jungle courtyard, once ‘a few corralled square yards’ but now transformed by the downstairs neighbour Liv into ‘an abundance of glossy green leaves and eight-foot-tall feathery ferns’. Most of Riley’s cast, it turns out, are desperate for sanctums of this kind.
In the end, ‘Shove’ overplays his hand; Sequence endures; and there is even space in the rejuvenated pages for a returning Putnam. Elsewhere, The Palm House is distinguished by an elegiac note. ‘Newspapers were big in those days,’ Putnam recalls of his teenage years in the sixth-form common room browsing the Times.
Style-wise, Riley is a fan of gaps, spaces, insinuations and stray glimpses that fleetingly illuminate her characters’ lives rather than drench them in arc light. Neatly and pertinently written, The Palm House seems oddly like a much longer work mischievously reproduced in shorthand. To borrow a line from the Fall’s Mark E. Smith: ‘Of what went on we only have this excerpt.’
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