Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House: A Masterful Study of Friendship and Disconnection
In the opening pages of Gwendoline Riley's seventh novel, The Palm House, London is shrouded in an eerie dust storm from the Sahara. As old friends Laura and Putnam reunite in a Southwark pub, with a packet of crisps between them, the city transforms into an unsettling spectacle: the sky turns a dark yellow reminiscent of iodine, while evening newspapers depict a blood-red sun and a jaundiced City square. This atmospheric backdrop sets the stage for Riley's latest exploration of human relationships, where the familiar becomes startlingly strange.
The Laureate of Disconnection
Much like a Saharan dust storm, Riley's work consistently reconfigures our understanding of ordinary lives, elevating the unremarkable into something profound and new. Her female protagonists, often writers themselves, navigate troubled relationships with precision. In First Love, shortlisted for the 2017 Women's Prize, Neve contends with an abusive marriage, while Bridget in 2021's My Phantoms grapples with a self-absorbed mother. Riley's novels frequently feature monstrous mothers who persist and fathers who are monstrous yet deceased.
Her stories eschew linear plots—where little happens in conventional terms—yet shimmer with tension through her disquieting acuity and spare, unsparing prose. Riley possesses a phenomenal ear for dialogue, capturing the myriad ways people inadvertently reveal themselves through both speech and painful silence. She has been aptly described as the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour tinged with the vertiginous lurch of despair.
A Subtler, More Elegiac Tone
In The Palm House, Riley adopts a subtler, more elegiac tone. She has cited Penelope Fitzgerald's influence on this novel, and while she has long shared Fitzgerald's economy and pin-sharp precision, a measure of Fitzgerald's wry tenderness now permeates the friendship between Laura and Putnam. The result is a slim, impeccably controlled narrative that contains multitudes within its pages.
Putnam, having served as deputy editor of the highbrow critical magazine Sequence for 25 years, resigns after his father's death and clashes with the crass new editor, Simon Halfpenny. His departure is likened to "the ravens leaving the Tower," symbolising the collapse of his meticulously constructed life into despair. Meanwhile, his version of London—where one could pursue passions on a living wage and afford a flat near work—feels outdated.
Laura, the narrator, works part-time for a popular history magazine, which Putnam dismissively calls "Take a Break." She values the income, stating, "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 spare rooms, finding Putnam's stubborn misery baffling. From his ivory tower, Putnam criticises her indifference: "You never cared about anything in your life."
Delicate Vignettes and Hidden Pasts
Laura does not argue, but through a series of immaculately rendered vignettes, Riley delves into her past: a fraught relationship with a self-absorbed mother, a teenage crush on a comedian that ends horrifically, and an affair with an actor who seemed to be "acting the part of being an actor." From childhood, Laura learned to be the audience, accommodating others and making herself scarce. In a poignant scene, a palm reader in Dubrovnik gently removes warts from her hands, revealing fresh, pink skin—a stranger's kindness alleviating her suffering and shame.
Laura recounts these memories without self-pity, and against these small annihilations, the affectionate understanding she shares with Putnam emerges as a quiet miracle. Riley writes with a poet's control, her prose so purely distilled it appears artless. For instance, a man disparaging his wife has "a cold, smooth voice, like a heavy pair of scissors cutting rich fabric," while Laura's father sniffs her teenage armpits and remarks, "It's not just me, is it, that's a pretty ripe smell?"
Skewering Cruelty with Newfound Tenderness
Riley has always skewered cruelty with shattering exactitude, but what distinguishes The Palm House is the gentle delicacy she brings to friendship's deep, unshowy solace. Moments of tenderness are exquisitely rendered, almost too intense to bear. Her characters remain mostly unknown to each other, their formative experiences hidden, yet in friendship's attentive steadiness, there is hope and perhaps healing.
The novel concludes as it begins, in the pub with easy companionship, packets of crisps split and spread on "bright silver platters" that embody, in their ordinariness, a kind of benediction. The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley is published by Picador (£16.99), offering a profound meditation on connection in a disconnected world.
