The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
If I told you that a book started with weather-based small-talk and crisps at the pub and ended with speculations on the lifespan of a rickety boiler, you might feel that riveting would be a highly inappropriate adjective to apply to such a book. If there are other books that begin and end the same way as The Palm House, it’s fairly likely you’d be right. When it comes to Gwendoline Riley’s seventh novel, however, your assessment would be way off. The Palm House is gripping from first line to last.
Under a sky turned yellowy-brown by Saharan dust, Laura and Putnam meet for a drink in an old pub near Southwark bridge. Both work in publishing, Laura as an assistant editor at a history magazine, Putnam as a deputy editor at Sequence, a high-brow arts publication of apparent cultural weight. Over salt and vinegar, we learn about the unravelling of Putnam’s Sequence-centric life: having worked there for 25 years, bought a flat within walking distance of the office, and become part of the fabric of the magazine, the death of Sequence’s long-time editor and arrival of his laddish, ignorant and upward-falling replacement leads to Putnam’s resignation. Like many highly intelligent and over-invested people, Putnam does not handle the situation well, putting Laura in the position of tolerant listener to his self-indulgent wallowing. So Laura listens.
But Laura has her own story. We get taken back to her childhood and the mundane monstrosity of detached maternal narcissism and offhand paternal cruelty, the more striking monstrosity of a stand-up comedian who insidiously exploits underage girls (think Russell Brand’s cockney affectations with less peacocking and more paedophilia), and holiday reminiscences that culminate in semi-supernatural wart removal and low-level verbal abuse from the locals.
What ties everything together is the calm, unaffected and supremely relatable way in which Riley has Laura narrate her experience, the prose beautifully weighted and finished, with enough moments of sparkle to remind you that you’re dealing with a writer of exceptional skill. And against the telling of Laura’s history, the exceptional ordinariness of her friendship with Putnam assumes a quietly moving magnificence. His grandiloquently self-important, self-imposed suffering in the midst of a situation that is really of minor significance set against Laura’s tolerant ear and traumatic past creates a believable irony that never falls into condemnation and maintains both characters as touchingly necessary to each other.
Ultimately, what The Palm House reminds us is that the truly moving stories exist in the quietness of the everyday, and that so much happens behind every moment in which nothing seems to be taking place. That’s a message worth being reminded of, especially when the reminder is written as well as this.
