The Palm House - Gwendoline Riley
Something that's struck me about a few of the books on this year's Booker Prize longlist is how they feel plucked out of a different era of fiction entirely. Missouri Williams is clearly going for an 18th century Gothic vibe with The Vivisectors, and M. John Harrison's The End Of Everything reminded me, when I reviewed it, of early 90s New Weird. The Palm House gave me a similar sensation, except here it felt like a classic Booker Prize literary novel, the sort of thing that could have slotted comfortably onto shelves in the 80s or 90s alongside Graham Swift or Julian Barnes. That's not a criticism at all, I love those books, and this felt very familiar in the best possible way. It felt like the sort of lit fic I grew up reading. I haven't read any Riley before, so I've no idea whether that familiarity is typical of her work or something she was doing deliberately here.
What I took from the book is that it's largely about finding comfort in friends, in familiarity, in shared history. A lot of the other books on this longlist are preoccupied with disillusionment, loneliness, and people drifting apart from one another. The Palm House is different. The characters here are deeply connected, and most of what we learn about that connection comes through their shared past, the things they've been through together. It reads like a comfort read, which sounds like an odd thing to say about a newly-published novel, but that's the impression I came away with. It felt like a book I'd already read before, in the sense that it was instantly familiar rather than derivative. Riley achieves that partly through how well the characters know each other, and partly through her prose, which is gorgeous. An absolute joy to read, this one.
That said, if you hated the men in Helen Of Nowhere, you're going to loathe some of the men in this book. Some of the worst men on the entire longlist turn up here, and yet the book still manages to feel hopeful in spite of them. There's a genuinely difficult scene fairly early on, where the narrator, as a teenager, is raped by an older celebrity who's spent time grooming her. It's uncomfortable, it comes out of nowhere, and it's not an easy read. But even with that sitting in the book, The Palm House never tips over into despair. There's a fury about men simmering under the surface of the whole thing, a sort of barely restrained fed-upness, but it never overwhelms the narrator or takes away her sense of self.
There's a loose plot here, but the plot isn't really the point. Most chapters read more like standalone vignettes, little tales and anecdotes pulled from Laura's life, and together they build up a picture of who she is: the people around her, the events that have shaped her, what she wants, what she's achieving. As I said, it all felt very familiar, like something I'd read or heard before, but in a comforting way rather than a stale one. Of everything on the longlist, this was the one that felt most relaxing to read, and it stands in fairly stark opposition to a lot of the angrier, more disillusioned books on the list this year. There's still anger here, but the disillusionment has gone, and what's left is a sense of hope, built out of the comfort and strength that friends and family can provide.
Overall this feels like a standout on the longlist, not because it's better than everything else necessarily, but because it feels different. It's still dealing with a lot of the same territory as the rest of the list, ideas about masculinity chief among them, but it comes at those ideas from a completely different angle, and I appreciated that a great deal. Would definitely recommend giving it a go.