Gwendoline Riley's 'The Palm House': A Tender Study of London Friendship
In the opening pages of The Palm House, London is shrouded in a dust storm from the Sahara, casting the city in an eerie, unsettling light. As old friends Laura and Putnam meet in a Southwark pub, with a packet of crisps between them, the atmosphere turns strange: the sky appears "dark yellow … like iodine", while evening papers depict a "blood red sun" and a "jaundiced" City square. This surreal backdrop sets the stage for Gwendoline Riley's latest work, which masterfully recasts the familiar into something startling and new.
Riley's Signature Style: Skewering Cruelty with Precision
Gwendoline Riley has long been celebrated for her ability to dissect bad relationships with shattering exactitude. Her female protagonists, often writers themselves, grapple with abusive dynamics: from Neve's troubled marriage in First Love, shortlisted for the 2017 Women's prize, to Bridget's struggles with a self-involved mother in My Phantoms. Riley's novels typically feature monstrous mothers and absent fathers, structured not around linear plots but through disquieting acuity and spare, unsparing prose that shimmer with tension. Her phenomenal ear for dialogue reveals the myriad ways people unknowingly expose themselves, making her the laureate of disconnection, with bone-dry humour edged by despair.
A Subtler, More Elegiac Tone in 'The Palm House'
In her seventh novel, The Palm House, Riley adopts a subtler, more elegiac tone, influenced by Penelope Fitzgerald's wry tenderness. This is evident in the friendship between Laura and Putnam, which forms the heart of the story. Putnam, after 25 years as deputy editor of the highbrow magazine Sequence, resigns following his father's death and clashes with a crass new editor, plunging into despair as his meticulously constructed life unravels. Laura, the narrator, works part-time for a popular history magazine and navigates London's rental market, living in house shares or spare rooms. She finds Putnam's misery baffling, while he dismisses her indifference, yet their bond becomes a quiet miracle against life's small annihilations.
Delving into Laura's Past: Vignettes of Struggle and Kindness
Through immaculately rendered vignettes, Riley delves into Laura's past, revealing a fraught relationship with a self-absorbed mother, a teenage crush ending in horror, and an affair with an overly theatrical 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 rubs warts from her hands, uncovering "fresh, pink" skin—a stranger's kindness that relieves her suffering and shame. These recollections are offered without self-pity, highlighting the deep solace found in friendship.
The Power of Friendship and Riley's Poetic Prose
Riley writes with a poet's control, her prose so purely distilled it seems artless. She captures cruelty with exactitude, as in a man's "cold, smooth voice, like a heavy pair of scissors cutting rich fabric" or a father's demeaning comment about Laura's smell. What's new in The Palm House is the gentle delicacy she brings to moments of tenderness, rendering the unshowy solace of friendship with such intensity it becomes almost unbearable. Her characters remain mostly unknown to each other, yet in attentive friendship, there is hope and healing. The novel concludes as it begins, in the pub with easy companionship and crisps on "bright silver platters", embodying a benediction in ordinariness.
The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley is published by Picador, offering a slim, impeccably controlled story that contains multitudes, exploring the complexities of human connection in modern London.
