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In the opening pages of The Palm House, London is enveloped in a dust storm blown up from the Sahara. As old friends Laura and Putnam meet for a drink in a Southwark pub, a packet of crisps open between them, the occluded atmosphere renders the city unsettlingly strange: the sky is “dark yellow … like iodine”, while the pictures in the evening paper show a “blood red sun”, a “jaundiced” City square, a “prodigious cloud, menacing the Shard”.
Like a Saharan dust storm, Gwendoline Riley’s work recasts our relationship with the familiar, transforming ordinary, unremarkable lives of her characters into something startling and new. Her female protagonists, often writers themselves, struggle with bad relationships: in First Love, shortlisted for the 2017 Women’s prize, Neve grapples with an abusive marriage, while Bridget in 2021’s quietly brutal My Phantoms is caught up with her desperately self-involved mother. The mothers in Riley’s novels are mostly monstrous and persistent, the fathers mostly monstrous and dead. Her stories are not structured around linear plots – nothing much happens – but Riley’s disquieting acuity and her spare and unsparing prose makes them shimmer with tension. She has a phenomenal ear for dialogue, for the myriad ways in which people unknowingly lay themselves bare, both in what they say and, more agonisingly, in what they don’t – or can’t. She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with the vertiginous lurch of despair.
In The Palm House, her seventh novel, the tone is subtler, more elegiac. Riley has spoken about the influence on this novel of Penelope Fitzgerald, and, while she has long shared her economy and pin-sharp precision, a measure of Fitzgerald’s wry tenderness is strikingly in evidence in the friendship between Laura and Putnam on which the novel turns. The result is a slim, impeccably controlled story that contains multitudes.
Putnam has been deputy editor of Sequence, a highbrow critical magazine, for 25 years, but, shaken by his father’s death and unable to stick the crass new editor, Simon Halfpenny (“call me Shove”), he has recently resigned. It is, as one of his colleagues observes, like “the ravens leaving the Tower”: the meticulously constructed kingdom of Putnam’s life duly falls, plunging him into despair. Meanwhile his London, where people can not only make a living wage pursuing their passions but also afford a flat near the office, is already out of date. Laura, the book’s narrator, works part time for a popular history magazine (Putnam snootily disparages it as “Take a Break”) and is grateful for the money: “I could pay bills and make choices. I could feel like a person.” Like many thirtysomethings in London she lives in rented house shares or a friend-of-a‑friend’s spare room. She finds Putnam’s stubborn misery baffling. From his ivory tower Putnam dismisses her indifference: “You never cared about anything in your life.”
Laura does not contradict him. But slowly, delicately, in a series of immaculately rendered vignettes, Riley takes us back into Laura’s past: a fraught relationship with her blithely self-absorbed mother, a teenage crush on a standup comedian that ends in horror, an affair with an actor “so actorly, he seemed at times to be acting the part of being an actor”. From childhood, Laura has learned to be the audience, the listener who accommodates others, who makes herself scarce. In one striking scene a palm reader in Dubrovnik gently rubs the warts from her hands, revealing the “fresh, pink” skin underneath: it takes a stranger to show kindness, to relieve her of her suffering and her shame.
Laura’s recollections are offered levelly and without self-pity but, against their small annihilations, the affectionate understanding she shares with Putnam feels like a quiet miracle. Riley writes with a poet’s control, her prose so purely distilled that it appears artless. A man contemptuously disparaging his wife has “a cold, smooth voice, like a heavy pair of scissors cutting rich fabric”. Laura’s monstrous father sniffs Laura’s teenage armpits and declares, “It’s not just me, is it, that’s a pretty ripe smell?” Riley has always skewered cruelty with shattering exactitude. What is new is the gentle delicacy she brings to the deep and unshowy solace of friendship, moments of tenderness so exquisitely and exactly rendered that they are almost too intense to bear. Riley’s characters remain, as humans must, mostly unknown to one another, the experiences that have formed them hidden from view, but in the attentive steadiness of friendship there is hope, perhaps even healing. The novel ends as it begins, in the pub, in easy companionship, packets of crisps split down the seams and spread out on “bright silver platters” that embody, in their ordinariness, a kind of benediction.
