All of Gwendoline Riley’s past six novels, published to acclaim over the last 19 years, feature dreadful parents. Mocking, misogynistic, violent fathers, and extroverted yet socially inept mothers hover like spectres in the background of her stories. In First Love, which was nominated for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for fiction in 2017, a woman’s toxic parents foreshadow and haunt an unhealthy relationship. In Sick Notes and Opposed Positions, the protagonists try to escape their families through writing, casual sex and heavy drinking in Manchester bars.
Riley’s central characters have aged in step with her (the author is in her early forties) and she has brought a keen ear and eye to the complexities of life in one’s twenties and thirties. In recent years, Riley has attracted something of a cult literary following, and she is now revered for her caustic first person voice, and her unflinching depictions of troubled — and often traumatic — relationships.
In My Phantoms, Riley’s sharp, funny and coolly devastating new novel, parents take centre stage. The book’s narrator, Bridget, is barely there — present only to tell the story of her mother’s life with blistering clarity, and of what it was like to be her daughter.
We are introduced to Helen, Bridget’s mother, through her own parents, establishing the questions which compel the novel: why is Helen the way she is, and more broadly, how does society shape people as parents? Helen’s father worked for Shell Oil in Venezuela after the war, and there they enjoyed a “well appointed” company house, along with “the Colony club and the tennis courts”. When they move back to England when Helen is a teenager, she struggles to assimilate into normal British life.
By beginning with this particular mid-century British experience, Riley establishes a character whose expectations of life will always be disappointed. Helen is a tragic figure, obsessed by the appearance of happiness but with no idea of how to achieve the real thing. She goes through her life with a jolly British stoicism, a “determined vivacity,” capturing the “carry on” spirit that is, really, a refusal to see reality as it is. “Her isolation could only further endorse her self-image,” observes Bridget. “She was the fairytale misfit. […] She only had to wait and be brave”.
The book’s cover, a Bill Brandt photograph of a sphinx in London’s Chiswick House gardens, reflects this: Helen is a woman transplanted from an exotic country, alone and out of place in her English surroundings.
We follow Helen’s life through her disastrous first marriage to Bridget’s father — a familiar figure in Riley’s universe, full of “spirited scoffing” and “spiteful authority” — through a friendship with a colleague with whom she has nothing in common except for shared loneliness, to her house moves around Liverpool in an ongoing quest for “a community”. With Bridget in her thirties, and Helen in her late sixties, Riley homes in on their search for a functioning adult relationship. But old age and illness creep up on Helen, and the downfall of our tragic heroine brings the novel to its close.
Critics have accused Riley of writing only about her own life — like her, her protagonists are all writers, hailing from north-west England and their parents are all of a type — but to see only biography is to miss her skill as a novelist. Riley has the ability to draw out the subtle workings and cruelties of relationships and psyches, and wrest them into compact, hard-hitting stories.
We should hope that Riley goes on as she has done, her female characters — complex minds, written with sharp intelligence and humour — ageing in line with her own passage through adulthood. If she does, she will produce a legacy of unflinchingly told stories about the lives of contemporary women.
My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley, Granta, RRP£12.99 208 pages
Baya Simons is an FT Weekend journalist
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