The Palm House is the first book I’ve read from this year’s Booker Prize longlist. Sadly it didn’t have the emotional heft or intellectual I expect to find in a Booker contender.
It offers some sharply observed dialogue and a strong evocation of the atmosphere of London in the late 2010s. But overall it left me underwhelmed. but left me with that “Is that all?” feeling. never really warmed to the book or its characters.
The novel focuses on a long-running friendship between two people who are part of the London media world. Laura Miller (the narrator) met Edmund Putnam met when she contributed articles to the Sequence cultural magazine where he has worked for almost his entire career.
They stay in touch, meeting up periodically to discuss the state of their lives over a couple of drinks and bags of crips.
At the beginning of the novel Laura is listless and looking for ways to improve her life. Putnam is struggling too with the death of his father and the arrival of a new editor at Sequence. The new guy has ideas for modernising the magazine creating ‘a sort of London version of the New Yorker’ that Putnam finds so abhorrent he’s about to resign.
That’s it, really. Not very much happens in The Palm House. I’d hesitate to even say there is a plot. There’s no unexpected turn of events, no crisis, and no real change of pace.
We just get scenes where Laura and Putnam chew over old ground, catch up on office gossip and share vague recollections of their teenage enthusiasms. Mostly they meet in a Thameside pub but occasionally share a homemade curry or egg and chips in a greasy spoon cafe.
In between these encounters we learn Laura’s backstory including a fraught relationship with her self-absorbed mother, and a teenage crush where she becomes the innocent victim of grooming.
There’s so much back story that it threatens to minimise the real centre of the book which is the Laura/Puttnam friendship. Why did Gwendoline Riley place so much emphasis on Laura’s past? The only thing I could think of was that she wanted to show that Laura has a history of being passive, the inferior one in a relationship.
That comes across in her relationship with Putnam. It’s not a friendship of equals. He’s the one who talks, she’s there to listen and prop him up when he feels down (which is most of the time). He’s dismissive of her role as editor for a history magazine and can often be hostile. Yet she plays along.
He didn’t want reassurance. He didn’t want sense. He didn’t want fellowship. He did not want a substantive conversation. I found it mind-bending, to be faced down by this wilful ignorance from one of the cleverest people I knew. I felt like a prey object.
The trouble is that I couldn’t summon up a lot of interest in either of these people. The book is built almost entirely out of dialogue and observation, with very little interiority to fall back on. As a result I came to the end of the book knowing very little about them, their thoughts, doubts or beliefs reactions. They didn’t live beyond the moments of their encounters. so while I enjoyed their clipped, evasive, faintly barbed dialogue I kept waiting for them to become more than just the sum of their exchanges. But it didn’t happen.
Will The Palm House win the Booker Prize? I very much doubt it will. I’d be surprised in fact if it made it to the shortlist.
We're all friends here. Come and join the conversation