Nearly a decade after Eimear McBride published The Lesser Bohemians (her second novel after the success of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing),the Irish writer has returned to the drab, smoke-filled world of 1990s London. The City Changes its Face is told from the perspective of 20-year-old Eily, two years after she has left Ireland to study drama in London and has met Stephen, an established actor 20 years her senior. In the interim period, the pair have moved from Kentish Town to Camden. Eily has taken time out of drama school, and Grace, Stephen’s daughter from a previous relationship, has made an appearance. The novel consists largely of a conversation that takes place over the course of one night, with flashbacks to the intervening years.
McBride’s style is so direct that describing it at all seems somehow insulting. To say that it is ‘experimental’ doesn’t do justice to its flexibility and force. As with the earlier novels, we become immersed in the female narrator’s viewpoint. We feel all the other characters through Eily’s moods and hear dialogue modulated through her thoughts. Yet the style has not stagnated over the years. The City Changes its Face makes use of so much blank space – sparse dialogue with frequent line breaks – that it often feels like a play or film script. This is fitting for Stephen and Eily’s professions, as well as McBride’s own interests. Her 2021 short story collection, Mouthpieces, approximated dramatic monologues, and in 2023 she directed a Very Short Film About Longing.
At the centre of the novel is a rumbling disagreement between Stephen and Eily, which doesn’t fully reveal itself until the final pages.
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