In her latest novel, The City Changes Its Face, Eimear McBride delivers a masterfully crafted exploration of love, identity, and artistic awakening set against the backdrop of mid-1990s London. Known for her groundbreaking experimental prose in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians, McBride once again pushes boundaries while maintaining a delicate balance between innovative form and emotional resonance.
The Heart of the Story
The narrative unfolds over a single rain-drenched night in Camden, December 1996, as twenty-year-old drama student Eily and forty-year-old actor Stephen confront the fractures in their two-year relationship. Through their intricate dialogue and internal reflections, we traverse the landscape of their love affair, from its passionate beginnings to its current crisis point.
McBride weaves multiple timelines with remarkable dexterity, moving between the present night, their first summer together, and the autumn that brought everything to a head. The story explores how their relationship is tested by various forces: Stephen’s reconnection with his teenage daughter Grace, his autobiographical film about childhood trauma, and Eily’s emerging identity crisis as she questions her chosen path in drama school.
Style and Structure
The author’s distinctive prose style reaches new heights of sophistication here. While retaining the stream-of-consciousness approach that marked her earlier works, McBride achieves a greater clarity without sacrificing emotional intensity. Her sentences pulse with life, alternating between staccato fragments and flowing passages that mirror the characters’ states of mind:
“Time, this summer. So much on my hands. Rife with impulses that I could not bear to chase down because I know myself. Know myself. Or is that knew?”
The novel’s structure is particularly innovative, with the narrative constantly shifting between different temporal planes while maintaining a coherent emotional through-line. This temporal fluidity serves the story well, reflecting how memory and present experience interweave in moments of crisis.
Strengths and Notable Elements
Character Depth
Both protagonists are drawn with extraordinary complexity
Supporting characters, especially Grace, are fully realized
The age gap between Eily and Stephen is handled with nuance and honesty
Thematic Richness
Exploration of artistic identity and authenticity
The relationship between personal and creative expression
Intergenerational trauma and its effects
The nature of truth in both art and life
Setting
The novel’s portrayal of 1990s Camden is vivid and atmospheric, with the London setting becoming almost a character in itself. McBride captures both the physical landscape and the cultural moment with precision and insight.
Critical Analysis
While the novel’s achievements are significant, there are aspects that might challenge some readers. The experimental prose style, though more accessible than McBride’s earlier works, still demands active engagement. Some may find the temporal shifts disorienting, particularly in the novel’s middle section.
The pacing occasionally slows during extended introspective passages, though these ultimately serve the novel’s deeper purpose of exploring consciousness and memory. The resolution might feel ambiguous to readers seeking more definitive closure, though this ambiguity appears intentional and thematically appropriate.
Comparative Context
The City Changes Its Face sits comfortably alongside other contemporary works exploring artistic identity and complex relationships, such as Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. However, McBride’s unique prose style and unflinching examination of psychological complexity set her work apart.
Impact and Significance
The novel makes a significant contribution to contemporary literary fiction, particularly in its innovative approach to narrative structure and its profound exploration of creativity, love, and identity. McBride continues to push the boundaries of what the novel can achieve while maintaining emotional authenticity.
Recommendation
Despite its occasional challenges, The City Changes Its Face is a remarkable achievement that rewards careful reading. It’s particularly recommended for:
Readers who appreciate literary innovation
Those interested in explorations of artistic identity
Fans of complex, psychologically rich relationship narratives
Admirers of McBride’s previous work
Final Verdict
The City Changes Its Face is a bold, beautiful, and occasionally difficult work that confirms McBride’s position as one of our most interesting contemporary novelists. While it may not be for every reader, those willing to engage with its complexity will find a deeply rewarding experience that lingers long after the final page.
For those new to McBride’s work, this might actually serve as a more accessible entry point than her earlier novels, while still offering the linguistic innovation and emotional depth that have become her hallmarks. It’s a significant addition to her body of work and to contemporary British literature as a whole.