In Gwendoline Riley's seventh novel, The Palm House, London is enveloped in a Saharan dust storm as old friends Laura and Putnam meet for a drink in a Southwark pub. The occluded atmosphere renders the city unsettlingly strange, with a 'dark yellow' sky and a 'blood red sun'. Riley's work recasts the familiar, transforming ordinary lives into something startling and new.
Riley's female protagonists often struggle with bad relationships, as seen in First Love and My Phantoms. Her stories lack linear plots, but her disquieting acuity and spare prose make them shimmer with tension. She has a phenomenal ear for dialogue, capturing how people unknowingly lay themselves bare. She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with despair.
In The Palm House, the tone is subtler, more elegiac. Riley has cited Penelope Fitzgerald's influence, and a measure of Fitzgerald's wry tenderness is evident in the friendship between Laura and Putnam. The novel is a slim, impeccably controlled story that contains multitudes. Putnam, recently resigned from his highbrow magazine job, is plunged into despair, while Laura, the narrator, works part time and finds his misery baffling.
Through immaculately rendered vignettes, Riley takes us back into Laura's past: a fraught relationship with her mother, a teenage crush ending in horror, an affair with an actor. Laura has learned to be the audience, making herself scarce. In one striking scene, a palm reader in Dubrovnik gently rubs the warts from her hands, revealing fresh skin beneath. Against small annihilations, the affectionate understanding she shares with Putnam feels like a quiet miracle.
Riley writes with a poet's control, her prose purely distilled. She skewers cruelty with shattering exactitude, but what is new is the gentle delicacy she brings to the deep solace of friendship.
