A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2014)
Who wrote it?
Eimear McBride (1976- ; active 2013- ), born Liverpool, England to Irish parents. She moved with them back to Ireland at the age of three, spending time in Tubercurry, Sligo and Mayo. She began writing as a young child, and moved to London aged 17 to attend The Drama Centre, but decided after graduating that she had no interest in becoming an actress.
It took her nine years to find a publisher for this, her first novel, and she had already completed much of her second during this long search for a publisher. She had also moved to Norwich, England, where her husband Wiliam Galinsky was running an arts festival. A chance conversation between Galinsky and Henry Layte, owner of the Book Hive bookshop in Norwich, finally led to A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing being published, as the second release on Layte’s newly formed small independent press, Galley Beggar.
The book was a massive critical success, first taking the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that “breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form” (beating fellow shortlisted books by the likes of Ali Smith and David Peace), before taking the 2014 Women’s Prize and receiving a wealth of other awards and nominations.
Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (2016) was published by Faber and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize as well seeing her shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize again. Her third novel, Strange Hotel, was published in 2020.
What's it about?
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a stream-of-consciousness novel, told from the perspective of an unnamed Irish girl in highly distinctive, fractured prose. It’s largely addressed to her brother, also unnamed and referred to as ‘you’ throughout. His life is limited by the impact of brain damage from the removal of a childhood trauma, but the love between the two siblings is evident throughout, in a novel that doesn’t offer much else in the way of solace.
Her family home is fatherless, and populated by a mother and other passing relatives that seem to offer little comfort to the siblings. The narrator is abused in her family home by an uncle as a young teenager, and she subsequently takes herself on a journey of sexual abandonment which begins as meaningless distraction (as she heads to college) but spirals into increasingly troubling masochism, particularly as the uncle re-enters her life.
What I liked
This novel has caused me to reconsider my usage of the word ‘unique’ on this blog. I feel like I’ve used it to describe books that, next to this, are anything but. While both Booker Prize and Women’s Prize have produced the occasional experimental-leaning winner (I’m thinking off the top of my head of G. for the former, among others, and Fugitive Pieces for the latter) the bulk of the prize-winning corpus I’ve covered so far has been made up of books written in generally conventional prose, even if their themes or structure may be innovative. Neither Prize has seen a winner that treats language in quite such a malleable way as this one. It’s a striking, and (as others have said) rather exhilarating read as a result.
Alongside this, we have the subject matter, which is brutal, fearless and punctuated by ever-more troubling shocks. It’s neither an easy book to parse grammatically nor an easy story to take in thematically. It’s full of potentially triggering themes: rape, abuse, extreme violence, all the more challengingly presented in the initially naive voice of a young girl/woman. Probably the most outright tough read subject-matter wise (for me) since The Bone People. It’s not easy, but it’s attention-grabbing (and -holding), to say the least.
That use of language is not just unique for the sake of it: by the time it hits its stride it’s language that’s really doing something almost physical to the reader. Sentences elide or tail off, words concatenate, mutate, and reinvent themselves. It does a stunning job of capturing a thought-process that slips and slides between visceral intensity and nihilistic apathy. Really remarkable stuff.
It also gives the novel a real sense of pace, rising tension and urgency. At times it feels frantic, chaotic and anxiety-inducing, but that only enables its sparsely-deployed moments of beauty and purity to stand out and deliver heightened impact.
Its ending, terrible and tragic as it is, is also an example of this irruption of poetic beauty wrought from darkness. I loved it.
What I didn’t like
This one undoubtedly won’t be for everyone. Given that I usually use ‘entertaining’ as a criteria for rating books on here, it’s definitely not that. It’s also harrowing and far from an easy read in multiple senses.
I have to admit that when I first picked this one up, I hated it. I don’t agree with many of the reviewers that you immediately feel in the presence of genius. I found the language hard to penetrate and (deliberately, of course, in retrospective) childish and irritating. It was also hard to latch onto where it was going. While this opening section might benefit from a re-read, I definitely didn’t fall in love with it from the off.
If you have the same initial experience, I’d strongly advise sticking with it. While I initially found myself wanting the language to evolve as the narrator grew, it’s something you ultimately settle (??) into and realise there’s a sad purpose to it all: in reality, the narrator is never able to progress the thought patterns that the language represents, and which contain beauty, but also chaos and tragedy.
At times I did find the anxiety-inducing nature of the language a little difficult. As I’ve said, it’s far from easy, but for me it was ultimately rewarding. Fair warning that others may not be able to stick it out, though.
Food & drink pairings
Funereal tea and sandwiches
Cigarettes
Fun facts
After a year with no sponsor in 2013, following Orange’s departure the previous year, 2014 saw the Prize receive a new sponsor in the shape of drinks conglomerate Diageo, who decided to use the Prize to promote their sugary Christmassy tipple Bailey’s Irish Cream. For the next four years, we had the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, as a result.
McBride’s debut was a adapted for the stage in 2014 by Chicago-born Annie Ryan, founder of Dublin’s Corn Exchange theatre. A one-women show, it was apparently quite an impressive feat of editing, cropping some 85% of the book’s text for a streamlined show. It premiered in Norwich (appropriately) before travelling to London, New York and beyond.
Vanquished Foes
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
Hannah Kent (Burial Rites)
Jhumpa Lahiri (The Lowland)
Audrey Magee (The Undertaking)
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
Some big names once more, of which I’ve read and enjoyed The Goldfinch (naturally!) but none of the others. Lahiri’s The Lowland was also on the Booker Prize’s 2013 shortlist, losing out to The Luminaries.
In 2014, Richard Flanagan’s excellent The Narrow Road to the Deep North took the Booker, in the first year in which Americans (and other non-Brit/Commonwealth authors) were eligible.
Context
In 2014:
ISIS / Daesh begins offensive in Iraq; declares caliphate
Disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370
Ebola epidemic in West Africa kills more than 11000
Ukranian revolution after days of civil unrest in Kyiv
Russian annexation of Crimea
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 shot down over Ukraine
Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping in Nigeria
Election of Narendra Modi as Indian PM
Peshawar school massacre in Pakistan
US intervention in Syria
Ferguson riots in Missouri, US following shooting of Michael Brown
Scottish Independence referendum sees Scotland vote to remain part of the UK
Colorado becomes the first jurisdiction in the modern world to officially begin state-licensed sales of cannabis
Eurovision song contest won by Austrian drag artist Conchita Wurst
Brazil World Cup is won by Germany, who defeat the hosts 7-1 in the semi-finals
Opening of One World Trade Center in NYC, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere
Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
Interstellar
Boyhood
Whiplash
The Lego Movie
Taylor Swift, 1989
St. Vincent, St. Vincent
Sia, 1000 Forms of Fear
Ed Sheeran, x
Life Lessons
Oh dear, none that are especially pleasant, I fear…
Score
9.5
A stunning read that surprised me in many ways. Powerful and (genuinely) unique.
I also gave 2014’s Booker winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North a well-deserved 9.5. A fine vintage, it seems!
Ranking to date:
Property (2003) - Valerie Martin - 9.5
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2014) - Eimear McBride - 9.5
The Idea of Perfection (2001) - Kate Grenville - 9
Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 9
The Lacuna (2010) - Barbara Kingsolver - 9
When I Lived in Modern Times (2000) - Linda Grant - 9
Larry’s Party (1998) - Carol Shields - 8.5
Bel Canto (2002) - Ann Patchett - 8.5
Small Island (2004) - Andrea Levy - 8.5
A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999) - Suzanne Berne - 8.5
May We Be Forgiven (2013) - A. M. Homes - 8
The Tiger’s Wife (2011) - Téa Obreht - 8
On Beauty (2006) - Zadie Smith - 8
A Spell of Winter (1996) - Helen Dunmore - 8
The Road Home (2008) - Rose Tremain - 7.5
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005) - Lionel Shriver - 7.5
The Song of Achilles (2012) - Madeline Miller - 7
Home (2009) - Marilynne Robinson - 7
Fugitive Pieces (1997) - Anne Michaels - 6.5
Next up
I’m taking a bit of a break from the winners’ read-through to check out some of this year’s Women’s Prize longlisted (and then, I guess, shortlisted) novels. When I return to this thread it will be with 2015’s How to Be Both, by Ali Smith.
