The City Changes Its Face, Eimear McBride
Two years into their relationship, we return to Eily and Stephen: the not yet 20-year-old drama student and an established, deeply scarred actor approaching his 40s. It’s the 90s in London. Split between two points in time, The City Changes its Face negotiates one conversation as it escalates over the course of a night and, in the second timeline, we drift through a timeline of their relationship. Diving deeper into these character’s pain points, past and present, The City Changes its Face offers something decidedly more direct, bringing characters we saw in grainy black and white into something sharper still.
Eimear McBride’s latest novel is a sequel of sorts of The Lesser Bohemians, but it could also easily be read as a standalone. In many ways, it’s as though McBride took characters already familiar to her and decided to navigate their relationship from another angle, taking the broken pieces of them and reflecting them back in a newly distorted house of mirrors. This is her art – the captivating way in which she cuts up sentences and throws all rules of structure and grammar out of the window to piece together something fragmented and perhaps more truthful to our innermost workings as rational thought and emotion compliment and collide.
In so many ways, The City Changes its Face to its predecessor is different, but it is also the same. The themes are no less cold and brutal, addressing child abuse, addiction, violence, and redemption. However, where The Lesser Bohemians maintains some distance, The City Changes its Face scrutinises it under stark, white light as Stephen attempts to build a relationship with his teenage daughter not two years younger than Eily.
Equally, we learn more of the strains of the arts through Eily; of wearing the skin of so many characters at a point in time to the point that she is only just learning who she might be. We see how first relationships can often feel like this too. More so, we see the reality of navigating an age difference in her relationship, the impact of Stephen’s upbringing on his own journey with fatherhood, and the cavity that subsequently forms between Eily and Stephen because of it. Throughout the novel, London warps and distorts around them, as a place so often tarnished by the wrongs done by us.
In many ways, this felt like an indulgent novel for Eimear McBride to write. I don’t know that more needed to be said about these characters, but I relished in it all the same. I relished her language, and the way that London looms as a character of its own, seeming to serve as a reminder that many have weathered scars in its walls.
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