The randomness and sheer drifting routine of daily life countered by the way a specific event brings sudden change are well described in this strange, vivid novel about emotional and psychological dislocation. Alex is an artist, or rather was, until a horrifying accident not only almost kills her, it steals her memory and leaves her in a state of aimless free fall.
There is no doubt that McNeill has a satiric eye, yet her satire is not gratuitously vicious, it conveys resigned realism and the sensation of simply going through the actions of being alive..
As part of her survival in a society of former artist friends incapable of dealing with her loss, Alex has become a companion of sorts to the all-consuming Conrad. He is her protector, at least she lives with him and they share a frank friendship based on mutual need. Handsome and sexually hyperactive Conrad, a transplanted Canadian artist, strides through his London world engaging in casual bisexual sex with most of the people he meets. Terrified of becoming an adult, Conrad, at 35, continues to behave like a big brother - except his kid brother killed himself.
McNeil works hard at characterisation, the players are vividly described and always shifting if, in most cases, only slightly. It is as though she is constantly changing her mind and reassessing her creations the more she watches. It is an interesting technique, in Private View, nothing is exactly as it first seems, nor are the characters and their individual situations.
Information is released slowly. Although she has set the narrative largely in the art world, she chooses to concentrate on the social side, the endless openings and the gossip. She explores the motivations of the artists and appears far more interested in this than in the work they create.
As a result of her accident and the half life she now inhabits, Alex merely exists; she eats and sleeps, works in an advertising agency and engages in wary conversation, although she is increasingly approaching a state of rage. In addition to the obvious themes of loss and survival, mourning and deception, the narrative's central concern is the nature of friendship and the point at which need and love become confused. Fear is also important - all of the main characters are frightened of something.
While it is Alex's story, she only gradually steps into centre stage and emerges as a person with the fragmented return of her memory. This process is speeded up through her relationship with Conrad and, more importantly, her intense and brief friendship with Erica, a woman with a complicated background and an odd marriage. It is through Erica, rather than the promiscuous Conrad, that McNeil examines the nature of sexual desire.
And it is through Erica that Alex discovers the anger that is festering away beneath the mild, somewhat shell-shocked demeanour her post-accident self has acquired. Erica is one of those people who moves between intense concern and apparent indifference.
Although McNeill describes her as an exotic, feminine, multi-cultural creature capable of warmth and charm there are several subtle hints at Erica's true personality. Alex is not sufficiently robust to deal with this. At one party, Erica breezes by, leaving Alex outraged: "For the rest of the night she drank lethal drinks ferociously and with a scowl on her face, the way she imagined jaded cabaret heroines of the Weimar Republic did, when the country was lost and they didn't give a damn anymore."
Throughout the novel, characters, objects and physical sensation, imagined and otherwise, are described with forensic detail. Alex lies in bed, listening to the early morning radio news and hears that the body of a Catholic woman has been found in a bog on the Armagh border. "She \ looked out her window into a dark London sky. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to be shot, lying alone in a bog.
"The cold sponge of the ground on her nose. Or maybe she had lain face up, counting the stars until they had extinguished themselves. Perhaps she was dead before she fell. She supposed it varied from person to person, how long it took to die after being shot."
MCNEIL does force language for effect. The forcing often succeeds although at times her prose has a self conscious lyricism and can strain for effect. But the writing is good because she tends to look beyond the obvious. Water and light are important, images of floating and drifting describe not only Alex' s current mental state but also the physical ordeal of survival and eventual rescue in the Central American rain forest. It is a book of ghosts, Alex is partly one herself, but there is also the ghost of her dead boyfriend, Ben, who was lost in the air crash and whose face she can no longer remember.
The narrative moves between ordinary scenes of daily life, the exhibition openings, the advertising agencies, the sexual intrigues, the conversations and the darker passages in which Alex's memory reconstructs her 16 days struggle in the jungle. There are no heroics, yet many extraordinary moments of surreal clarity such as when Alex finds a woman's shoe among the air crash debris, tries it on and is delighted when it fits. Then she discovers it is her own shoe.
These jungle sequences, as well as the various dream passages, are among the strongest sections of the novel. McNeil never sentimentalises Alex's dilemma as a survivor set apart, and instead approaches her with a detached sympathy. "If she [Alex \]thinks about her life now, then the sixteen days on her own couldn't have been less like a dream. It was real, so real she can still feel the soft mulch of the rainforest floor beneath her feet, she can feel thirst burning its way into her lungs. Nothing will ever be so real again. It is her life now that feels like a walking dream."
Superimposed on all this is her confusion in the face of her changing attitude towards Conrad. Again, McNeil does well here, largely thanks to the believable dialogue and the amount of emotional evasion going on between the characters.
By constantly pitching dream and reality, desire and hope, need and fear, this intelligent, watchful novel reveals itself as far darker and deeper than it initially appears.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Private View. By Jean McNeil. Weidenfeld, 312 pp. £12.99 sterling