My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
Review by Gary Kaill
Bridget, the narrator of My Phantoms, begins her story with an extended introduction to her father, Lee: a sour and cowardly chancer, whose desperate attempts to ingratiate himself into a life of London glamour inevitably leaves Bridget and her sister Michelle as necessary collateral. He was ‘a self-pollinating entity’, Bridget observes, as she reflects on the cruel mischief he enacts on those unfortunate enough to find themselves in his way. ‘A gripper of shoulders. A pincher of upper arms. If I was reading a book, a snatcher of books. Energized bother, in short.’ Admirers of Riley’s last novel, the devastating First Love, will be pleased to see that switching her attention from a wounded and toxic coupling to a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship does nothing to diminish her gift for unpicking the lives of flawed, fatally damaged people.
Lee’s meddlesome life and his subsequent early death function as narrative and emotional binding: a path to the years that follow, as Bridget and her mother, Helen, begin to navigate a route back into each other’s lives after years of cold silence.
My Phantoms is sensational: a story whose emotional acuity is seeded by extremes of both sadness and comedy. The latter is, of course, served pitch-black — Helen, or ‘Hen’, is a difficult, flinty character. Bridget’s boyfriend John, meeting for the first time, describes her as ‘unyielding’: a verdict that barely covers it. At the end of a testing evening at Bridget and John’s flat, one in which Hen has so utterly misread new friend Dave that she only discovers that he’s married once he’s arrived, John offers: ‘It just quickly became obvious that she wasn’t going to engage with anything that was actually being said.’
The comic aspect of the novel is wholly reliant on Hen, and a worldview characterised by judgement and sourness. Hen leaves Lee after seven years, while Bridget is still a baby, but this act of courage comes at a price: the fear of provoking a man prone to wounding flare-ups leaves Hen forever imprinted by her behaviour as a younger woman. Describing her mother’s predeliction for indulgence, Bridget recalls: ‘I’ve an image of a dog trying to join in with a football match, but that’s possibly too wretched.’
Perhaps so, but very much in keeping with the tone of a book that so unflinchingly charts the complex geography of the relationship between mother and daughter. My Phantoms is a brusing read, and often extrememly upsetting. The annual birthday meet-ups between Bridget and Hen each February in London are executed with an eye for the pained awkwardness and resentment required. All that remembering, the backfilling. A shift of venue from pub to vegan cafe misfires terribly, Hen performatively chewing though a detox salad: ‘I do like it, yes, but I’m not sure it’s going to like me, as your grandmother used to say.’ Each year, Bridget (herself, no less ‘difficult’, in many ways, as her mother: ‘Here I stopped saying emollient things’) weakens a little, the awful truth becoming ever more inarguable.
Bridget observes: ‘It was the usual formula. The theme was exclusion.The mood was wounded shock. But she spoke so eagerly. She was even more cheerful later on that night when she told me how a woman in her aerobics class had died.’
Part way through this sorrowful story, Bridget uncovers the truth of her mother’s living arrangements: a shock that causes her to re-assess her lack of support over the years, one that shakes the reader who might find themself in a similar position, having perhaps overstated an ageing parent’s ability to get by. A surfeit of the blackest comedy (present throughout) does little to erase the looming realities of this world.
A grind, then, in some ways, but hugely rewarding — but head elsewhere for redemptive bow-tying. Riley is emerging as one of our most fearless chroniclers of this impossible world. Never one for glancing away from the shadowy banalities of life, she understands implicitly that compassion is not the same as comfort, and she allows her characters the freedom to inhabit their own truth, no matter how harrowing. The encroaching tragedy at the heart of the story has been there from the first page, of course.
A masterclass in the complex art of the family portrait, My Phantoms is a book alive to the moment, brimming with purpose. It has much to say about the displacement suffered by both parent and child when circumstances conspire against both. Perhaps more so than any of her previous work, it sees Riley expand her scope: an increasing flair for pure storytelling, and a uniquely bleak comic signature, bolstering her gift for observation and commentary, and gifting us her most affecting work to date.
My Phantoms is published by Granta, 1st April 2021