Ashen and granular, yellow and brown, the skies are distressed in the opening chapter of Gwendoline Riley’s Booker Prize-longlisted novel, The Palm House. Saharan sand, and ash from forest fires in Spain and Portugal, churn through a hurricane; the weather, which causes the premature switching on of the lampposts on London’s Southwark Bridge, reveals the unsettling mood of this novel. Characters flounder through a haze of loneliness and everyday banalities. Conversations are often deadpan, stripped of sincerity, their emotional intent left unsaid. Relationships, like the skies, are murky.
When one first encounters them, friends Edmund Putnam and Laura Miller are at a pub, where they sip their drinks and munch on crisps. Laura, from whom the novel unspools in the first person, observes that “For my part, I found that funny, sallow atmosphere induced a peaceful sort of quiescence.” The Palm House is seething with undertones that threaten to disturb its carefully constructed quiescence, its atmosphere of faltering light through which characters emerge with their wine glasses and their derisive wit.
Putnam, who is 49 years old, has recently resigned from his role as editor at Sequence, a literary journal where he has worked for 25 years. A new editor, 30-something Simon “Shove” Halfpenny, has taken over, with plans to turn Sequence into a Londonesque New Yorker. Putnam is appalled: “And forgive me, but people who want to read the New Yorker can read the New Yorker, can’t they?” The novel traces his disorientation — his father, Martin, has died of pancreatic cancer, he is broody and nihilistic, believing that his departure from Sequence is inevitable, as he is no longer wanted there.
Author Gwendoline Riley | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Playing a part
The Palm House is an impression of friendships that endure, in spite of the vicissitudes of mood and circumstance. Through vignettes in pubs, amidst the jostle of other drinkers, over crisps and wine and bags of salt and vinegar, Laura and Putnam tell of a disintegrating literary establishment strewn with “thick-skinned philistines” like Shove. Laura, almost a decade younger than Putnam, is assistant editor at a mediocre history magazine, a job that offers her the stability of an income. Putnam scoffs at its crudeness, but to her it is a comfort amid the terrifying uncertainties of adult life in London.
Laura, the observant narrator, builds cityscapes by noticing objects and buildings and gestures. She sees an abandoned newspaper on the seat of a train, is attentive to the sound of her suitcase wheels on a crowded street, to the feline roll of a lover. She narrates her early years in Liverpool with her mother and grandmother; she recalls her mother mimicking a 70s sitcom when she called out to her in a foreign accent: “Speak-a to Charlie!” At 15, Laura is enamoured of Chris Patrick, a comedian whose sketch show she watches on Channel 4. She sends him C30 cassettes with recordings of her voice talking about home and school. Later in the novel, when Laura stays in the spare room of TV producer Mitch Seiler, who lives in Kensal Green, a historic neighbourhood, she finds herself speaking with a heightened awareness she describes as “a kind of kindled incredulity, as if coming upon him there, in his own house was an auspicious and enlivening coincidence…”
Characters are compelled to behave with actorly deliberation or nonchalance; they are on display in precarious circumstances, and they must play their parts well to emerge from the gloom.
Landscapes of make-believe
In The Palm House, even the inanimate play their roles to create a chimerical ambience. A dusty bathroom is reminiscent of Miss Havisham; paper gift bags on London train platforms “jinked like fish”; Victorian dark-wood pubs have stools that wobble. It is tempting, then, to compare the staged atmosphere of The Palm House with Katie Kitamura’s novel, Audition, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. The unnamed woman narrator of Audition, in circumstances entirely different from Laura’s, is similar in her affectations (she is an actress), and in the abstractions that torment her.
Real tenderness has a way of coursing through arid landscapes of make-believe, though. At Milano’s, Putnam tells Laura that his father Martin frequented the cafe while he was still up and around. He had developed a crush on a Polish waitress. She was always genuinely pleased to see him.
Genuine fondness, then, shines through the bleak weather in The Palm House.
The Palm House
Gwendoline Riley
Picador
₹750
The reviewer is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels.