Book review: A girl is a half-formed thing

In interviews, this much-admired novelist is explicit about her debt to Beckett, Edna O’Brien, but most of all, to Joyce. Her technique does owe much to Joyce’s particular variety of stream of consciousness in the Penelope chapter of Ulysses. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with its sustained experiment with free indirect discourse, is to my mind its most direct antecedent. Both novels adopt the discipline of a limited point of view, though it mostly avoids third person. McBride registers other voices mainly as internalized in the fractured consciousness of the unnamed main protagonist, whom we follow, as we do in Portrait, from the age of three to her early twenties. There is no dialogue as such, which means that the angle of narration has an unrelenting quality, compared with Joyce who is always at pains to ironise Stephen and to offer counterfoils.