Does art heal our trauma or wound us again?—The City Changes its Face, by Eimear McBride
by Eoghan Smith
Eimear McBride’s The City Changes its Face revisits the relationship between Stephen, an actor and director, and his partner Eily, a student twenty years his junior from her 2016 novel The Lesser Bohemians. The apprehensive dynamic between the pair, all tension and sex, is disturbed by the arrival from Canada of Stephen’s seventeen year-old daughter Grace, who he has not seen in twelve years. It is an uneasy arrangement: while Stephen and Grace cautiously navigate the long, unfulfilled gaps in their father-daughter relationship, the proximity in age between Eily and Grace leaves Eily in the odd position of filling a space somewhere between would-be step-mother, experienced older sister, and newly-made holiday friend.
At the thematic heart of the story are the ways in which we conceal and reveal ourselves
At the thematic heart of the story are the ways in which we conceal and reveal ourselves. Art, or more specifically acting, is a vehicle of self-exploration and disguise: we learn that Stephen has been working on a film based on his traumatic childhood, parental failure, and drug addiction, while Eily is grappling with the practicalities of her drama course and, internally, negotiation of her relationships with herself and others.
McBride splits the action between two alternating time periods that switch back and forth after a few paragraphs or pages. The first, termed ‘Now’, depicts an argument that unfolds over the course of a single night. A jar of piccalilli is thrown and a hand is cut, resulting in an accidental flesh wound that prefigures greater, deeper metaphorical and literal incisions. The second provides a backstory to ‘Now’, charting the events of Eily’s and Stephen’s relationship and the arrival of Grace over the course of seventeen or so months, from August 1995 to December 1996. This latter narrative serves as the backstory to the events of ‘Now’.
One of McBride’s great strengths as a writer is her expert pacing: both narratives cohere at the end of the book, where a terrible secret that threatens to destroy the relationship is revealed. In addition, there is brilliantly structured, lengthy section where all three characters watch a cut of Stephen’s film. This section is interspersed with dialogue between the characters – Stephen is coolly objective while Eily and particularly Grace are emotionally affected as viewers with more than a stake in the fictionalisation of Stephen’s life story. Through this section, McBride opens up that terrible question that resides in the chasm between real life and fiction: does self-reflexive art heal our trauma or wound us again?
Crucially, the story is told from Eily’s perspective in the first person. Although Stephen’s story dominates large parts of the book, we only see him through Eily’s imperfect knowledge and understanding of him. The narrative voice is typical McBride: fragmented, reflective, layered. She is brilliant at exploring those moments of sudden self-consciousness riven by doubt and self-awareness, and there can be no doubt that McBride is a highly inventive writer. She uses a variety of techniques to present the shifts in tone and mood: dialogue without speech marks that slaloms across the page; unpredictable, large spaces between words in the middle of sentences; smaller font to indicate Eily’s superego moderating her thoughts; broken sentences; irruptions of dialogue and remembered conversations that collide in on Eily’s interiority; nouns replacing verbs. Here, for instance, after a phone call with Stephen, is Eily turning over in her mind the imminent arrival of Grace:
Stephen, I wish I was there with you. Me too, Eily love, but another time. And knowing you meant it, I soldiered on into What do you think she’ll be like? Silence. Wait silent. I don’t know Eily, which seems such a weird thing to admit given we’ve exchanged letters for years, but I wish I knew her more. And then I thought Oh no, I’ve caused you pain down this shitty phone line. Because every nerve of your waiting, over all that time, must sit exposed now the end’s finally nigh. So don’t fucking poke.
Or Eily, looking at a cut on her arm in the middle of a fraught discussion:
Recalling me to the scarred circuits of his. All of which I have, over time, traced and kissed. Enquired into. Been told about. But never felt complicit in, so is that what’s going on? Perhaps. And fuck, tonight it’s all going on. So I’ll just go shall I go? With it?
McBride’s innovativeness has naturally, predictably, drawn comparisons with both Joyce and Beckett
McBride’s innovativeness has naturally, predictably, drawn comparisons with both Joyce and Beckett; Anne Enright in her blurb for the book goes further by saying she is their ‘natural heir’ (McBride is the latest Irish writer to be named as next in the line of succession). Perhaps it is helpful for publishers to posit McBride in these terms on book jackets as a way of preparing readers for what they are about to encounter. Or perhaps the greater intention is to indicate that modernist techniques for capturing the flows and fragments of interiority are still alive and well in contemporary literature, although those techniques have been so absorbed into the mainstream of literary fiction that comparisons to her forebears probably only obscure McBride’s own exceptional artistry. However, comparisons to Joyce and Beckett might be best read as statements about McBride’s own attempts to find a form of writing that can ‘accommodate the chaos’, as Beckett described it, and less about direct comparisons with their style.
McBride is one of the most intelligent, responsible, and serious writers at work today
The city of the novel’s title is London, specifically the north London districts of Camden, Kentish Town, Archway, Hampstead, Highgate, Regent’s Park. The urban environment is marvellously drawn in all its unstoppable busyness and irrepressible crackle, its energising excitement, sordid underbellies and sudden threat. Stephen and Eily’s Camden horribly claustrophobic flat (Grace can hear her father and Eily have sex through the walls), absorbs much of the external energy of the city. Behind closed doors, The City Changes its Face deals with some very serious themes such as drug addiction, self-harm, violence, and child abuse. It is not a book to be enjoyed, but it is certainly a book to be awed by.
McBride tells a hard, dirty, unpleasant story that keeps plunging the reader further into the depths of trauma, and every page compels you to look. The extended film scene makes for particularly uncomfortable reading as we discover the extent of inflicted and self-inflicted harm suffered by Stephen, and in turn we come to learn how that harm has shaped his own life and the lives of those he loves (and to what extent we are agents in our own lives is an open question in the book). But interpreting his life through this lens makes the point that art will take us into places we fear to go. Eily, it is suggested towards the end of the book, is beginning her own artistic journey as a writer. None of this is clichéd or trite: McBride is one of the most intelligent, responsible, and serious writers at work today. In the book, blood is literally spilled, first accidentally, and then by deliberately violent, vampiric biting during rough sex between Eily and Stephen. Bleeding in the midst of the sublime moment seems an appropriate piece of symbolism for the novel. To read The City Changes its Face is to see the lacerations, to open the cuts, to feel deeply each terrible wound.
Eoghan Smith is the author of The Failing Heart (2018), A Provincial Death (2022), and his latest novella, A Mind of Winter is out now with Dedalus Books.
