Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a difficult book to read. Firstly this is because of the style in which it is written: fragmented, jerky, linguistically inaccurate, often illiterate. It seems like stream of consciousness with about a quarter of the words removed. And with stuttering where there are words. Impossible for anyone to edit (other than McBride), it would have Grammarly wanting to lie down in a darkened room!
The second reason the book is hard is subject matter: religion, sex, and death. And the sex includes rape. And it’s all set against a background of a conservative Ireland.
Raw and emotional, the book is also, however, a tour de force. Once you get into the voice of McBride’s main character she drags you along kicking and screaming through the linguistic mud – as much as she is dragged through very real mud at the end of the story.
It’s probably the kind of book – form and subject – which an author cannot hope to repeat without the follow-up being weaker, a pastiche of the original. [For example (and not as a direct comparison) you can’t imagine a second Ulysses… Maybe that’s where Joyce went wrong with Finnegan’s Wake…]
In any event, if you’re feeling up for a challenge, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing might just reward your efforts.
Ian Gouge - Writer 