Category Books

Riley has always skewered cruelty with shattering exactitude. What’s new in this story of two old friends in London is the delicacy she brings to moments of tenderness

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.

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Ranging from quantum mechanics to eating disorders to the nature of fiction, this is a breathtaking interrogation of family, connection and memory

Transcription ends with an epilogue. It’s a letter, or at least an extract from a letter, written by Leopold Blaschka, a 19th-century Bohemia-born artist who, with his son Rudolf, crafted intricate and breathtakingly realistic models of flowers, plants and sea creatures made out of glass. So astounding was their technique, so uncanny, that sceptics assumed they must be using secret devices. “It is not so,” he insisted. “We have the touch. My son Rudolf has more than I have because he is my son and the touch increases in every generation.” Until this point, Blaschka hasn’t been referenced by name even once. But here, in coda form, is the essence of Transcription, a novel about touch, devices and familial inheritances that is itself intricate, uncanny, sometimes breathtakingly realistic.

It begins with a middle-aged American narrator travelling to Providence, Rhode Island, home to Brown University, where Ben Lerner studied poetry and political theory as an undergraduate. He is there to conduct a magazine interview with a polymathic German intellectual named Thomas. No ordinary assignment: Thomas was his mentor at college, the father of his friend Max, and now, at the age of 90, this conversation is expected to be his last will and testament. At the hotel, bathos strikes – the narrator drops his smartphone in a sink; it’s unusable and he’s too embarrassed to confess. Thomas soon gets into his conversational stride, but his rich sentences go unrecorded.

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