The first thing I did after finishing The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley was go back and read the opening two pages again, because I wanted to see whether the trick was visible from the start.
Two people are drinking outside a pub on the south bank of the Thames. The sky has gone the colour of iodine, because a storm has dragged sand up from the Sahara and ash from Spanish forest fires and dumped both over London. They eat crisps out of a bag one of them has carefully split along the seam and laid flat. They talk about a boy from school, decades ago, who read the Financial Times as though he were casing a bank vault.
That is it. That is the whole scene. And it is completely gripping, which is the thing about her books I find hard to explain to people who have not read them.
Almost Nothing Happens, and I Could Not Put It Down
The setup, such as it is: Laura tells the story, she is somewhere around forty, she writes and edits for a living. Her friend Edmund Putnam is forty-nine and has spent twenty-five years at a small, serious magazine called Sequence.
Then Sequence gets a new editor. He is called Simon Halfpenny, he wants everyone to call him Shove, he has been moved across from a sports magazine, and he announces that his plan is to turn the place into a London version of the New Yorker. Putnam’s father is also dying at the same time. Putnam resigns, and then spends a year being absolutely unbearable about it to everyone who loves him.
I recognised him instantly. Not the job, the behaviour. The friend in grief who will not accept comfort, who converts every reassurance into fresh evidence that nobody understands, who says he has had no job offers and then admits he has applied for nothing and somehow makes that your fault. Gwendoline Riley catches this so exactly that it stops being funny and starts being uncomfortable, then goes back to being funny again.
Nobody Writes Talk Like Gwendoline Riley
I have never read anyone who does dialogue quite like this. People interrupt themselves. They repeat a sentence they were pleased with. They answer a question they were not asked and ignore the one they were. Putnam has a habit of saying something and then saying it again slightly differently, and after a hundred pages you know his whole interior weather from that tic alone.
The jokes are wonderful and they are all in character. Someone renames a colleague’s self-published newsletter The Pitt Take. Somebody has produced a nickname for Shove based entirely on how he wears his jeans. Putnam, cooking a curry, lays out each spice in its own little dish because that is what they used to do on television, and announces that sultanas have gone out of fashion.
And Laura’s mother, who I would read an entire book about. Cornered in Ibiza by a friendly waiter asking after the boyfriend she has since got rid of, she cannot face the explanation, so she tells him the man is dead. Then she orders patatas bravas. When Laura objects, her mother repeats the Spanish for it with obvious relish and then translates it into a silly voice.
The Chapter I Had to Walk Away From
I am going to be careful here, because I think you should know this is in The Palm House before you start, and I also think you should meet it on the page rather than in a review.
In the second part, Laura goes back to being fifteen. She becomes a fan of a stand-up comedian. She records tapes of herself talking about school and posts them to his agent. He starts putting her on the guest list. And eventually she takes a train to London on her own to visit his flat.
What Gwendoline Riley does with that material is the most controlled writing I have read in years. She does not raise her voice. The register is identical to the pub scenes: dry, observant, faintly wry about her own teenage outfit. There is no adult narrator arriving to explain that a crime is being committed. There is a girl who does not yet have the vocabulary, a mother who told her to look words up rather than ask, and a trip to a chemist afterwards.
I had to put The Palm House down and go and do something else. Then I came back, and the next section is about buying a flat, and the novel simply continues, which is of course the point.
If this is difficult territory for you, please treat that seriously before you start. NAPAC supports adults who were abused as children and is a good place to begin if any of it lands close.
Where Gwendoline Riley Loses Some Readers
Honestly? Two things.
The world is small. Very small. This is a novel about a literary magazine in London, its Friday drinks, its board, its leaks to Private Eye, and the specific tragedy of a good institution handed to someone who is not interested in it. I found that completely absorbing and I accept that plenty of people will find it about as urgent as a parish council dispute.
The other is Laura. She notices everything and reveals almost nothing. Whole relationships come and go, including one lodging arrangement in the last third that quietly starts to feel dangerous and is then just over. I understand the design, I think it is deliberate, and I still finished the book feeling I had spent 130 pages with someone who never once turned to face me.
About That Title
Putnam and his father kept meaning to go to Kew together, to see the ancient cycad in the palm house, a plant that has been in a pot since the eighteenth century. They never go.
That is one palm. There is also the palmist at a Croatian beach who takes Laura’s teenage hands and rubs at them. There are Putnam’s own palms, cracked and crusted with eczema all through the year he is falling apart. Gwendoline Riley never joins these up for you. She just puts them where you will find them.
Late on, someone describes a neighbour’s courtyard garden as thriving on neglect, and then immediately corrects it: not total neglect, not abandonment. I sat with that sentence for a while. It is the entire novel, and she says it once, in passing, and moves on.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
My Phantoms is the obvious next Gwendoline Riley, and if you have somehow not read First Love, start there instead. Beyond her, Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt has the same English hush and the same ache about what a young person cannot yet say, and Confessions by Catherine Airey braids a woman’s present with a childhood that refuses to stay put. If you want something on the same longlist to set against it, Hunchback is not on the list but is the other recent short novel I have pressed on people with the same urgency.
The Verdict on Gwendoline Riley’s Eighth
Gwendoline Riley has written eight novels now, has been shortlisted for most things and won a few, and every time one arrives I wonder whether this will be the one where the method runs out. It has not run out. If anything she has got harder and more exact.
Nothing much happens in The Palm House. A man leaves a job. A father dies. A woman buys a flat. Somewhere in the middle a fifteen-year-old gets on a train. By the end I thought it was the best-written thing on the Booker longlist, and the one most likely to be passed over precisely because it makes no noise at all.
Read it for the talk. Stay for what she declines to say.
