On Eily’s 20th birthday, her 40-year-old partner, Stephen, gifts her an engraved bracelet. The inscription reads, “Eily, always, Stephen. August 1996″. The City Changes Its Face is an extended meditation on that “always”, on just how difficult and fragile any human pledge can become as it grapples with time and circumstance.
“Always” may involve a commitment to the future, but it is, inescapably, accompanied by the other “always”, the haunting traces of the past that keep up their stubborn vigil.
Eily and Stephen are characters we first meet in Eimear McBride’s earlier novel The Lesser Bohemians (2016), where the young drama student and older actor embark on their volatile, impassioned relationship. In The City Changes Its Face, the couple are settling into a larger flat. Eily is entering the final year of her drama studies, and Stephen is completing a film based on his traumatic childhood and experience with addiction.
The arrival of Stephen’s teenage daughter, Grace, from Canada, whom he has not seen for 12 years, is profoundly destabilising for Eily, as she negotiates the tricky triangulation of step-parenting. The closeness in age of partner and stepdaughter further complicates this realignment of roles.
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Difficulties, recriminations and estrangements accumulate as the couple try to deal with conflicting demands and unspoken desires. McBride is remarkable in her forensic ability to chart the infinitesimal shifts in mood and speech that capture the emotional confusion of her characters and their shaky, tentative moves towards provisional forms of understanding. Central to that understanding is the tracking of past harms and their infiltration of present behaviours.
An ingenious section of the novel involves a meticulous representation on page of the film Stephen makes about his early childhood and young adult years. McBride, who directed A Very Short Film about Longing (2023), has made effective use of her directorial experience to present Stephen’s tortuous past in a way that is unique and compelling. In the novel, Eily concludes, having seen Stephen’s film, that her partner managed to produce “beauty and life from all the f**k-ups” and this prompts her to seek her own redemption – or a reckoning of sorts with recent tragic events – by writing a story “with the truths only fiction allowed”.
The language McBride uses and her approach to storytelling have led to comparisons to the work of Jams Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Though these parallels are meant to be flattering, they may be doing McBride a disservice with their suggestion of the derivative and the imitative. What is apparent from A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), The Lesser Bohemians (2016), Strange Hotel (2020) and now The City Changes Its Face is that McBride’s style is utterly distinctive, a wholly original exploration of what is possible with language and fiction.
Reading McBride, in this sense, is a schooling in attention. The perfectly judged detailing of tiny, subterranean shifts in tone and perspective in the writing means that the reader’s focus is never allowed to slacken as she unpicks layer upon layer of emotion and recollection. McBride’s writing experiments – as brilliantly demonstrated by her latest novel – are there to draw readers in, not to keep them out. Indeed, one of the recurrent pleasures of The City Changes Its Face is the pull of the storyline as we become emotionally embroiled in the lives of characters who, like the reader, learn to make do with incomplete states of knowledge.
A big character in McBride’s latest novel is London itself. The narrative, tracking between the 1970s and 1990s, offers the city as a constant presence, benchmarking change but also, through its tough and unsentimental generosity, yielding possibilities that, elsewhere, are denied to newcomers. It is a reminder, that alongside Paris, London is the other great city of Irish literary modernism.
In a passage that gives the novel its title, Eily thinks about the places in the city whose memory she shares with Stephen: “Places for us where memory extends into times beyond these present and slipstreaming woes. But oblique, also, as London is. Whenever it chooses. Whenever it changes its face. Whenever it turns its attention from answers to questions.”
Moving beyond the bohemian experiments of her teens and facing into the freighted choices of adulthood, Eily is all too aware of the questions proliferating around her. It is the unsettled and unsettling energy of her examining that marks her out as a memorable character in fiction, just as Stephen’s refusal to carry the cursed baton of abuse from one generation to the next is a masterclass in human moral capacity. The City Changes Its Face is a singular achievement, the work of an author who is writing at the height of her creative abilities and who reminds her readers that, inevitably, “always” means remaining with the trouble, the troubling and the troublesome.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
