The Lesser Bohemians
By Eimear McBride
Published last year (2016) from the Baileys Women’s Prize winning author is again a compelling, captivating story. The novel tags a diffident 18-year-old Irish girl talking, writing and thinking in Eimear McBride’s characteristic broken sentences and unconventional metaphors, who arrives in London to attend drama school. However, the main drama is conducted offstage in pubs, parties and bedrooms. She meets a damaged actor twenty years older than her, and captures the exhilaration and self-doubt of first love. Yet as the story progresses, he starts taking away something internally private and whole.
A captivating story of passion and innocence in the vibrant atmosphere of London during the 1990s, The Lesser Bohemians glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful though unhealthy and violent new love.
More sensitive readers may be offended or disturbed by the many explicit passages and violent accounts of abuse and alcoholism; the rest of us are be grateful for the honesty and straight-forwardness.
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