You will always be in love, you will always be in love with love

By Sophie Atkinson

Imagine the same city you know, only refracted. Burnham’s not here yet, Chanel would never, the skyscrapers are in their infancy. Instead, there is a baggy surplus of time. Everyone you know either works at a bar or you met them at a bar. Every person in your orbit is kind of a slacker, which isn’t the same as not doing anything: Gene dresses up in a superhero cape and graffitis walls at night, Katja writes poetry, Margi’s in a band, Mary has an intricate photography project.

For the most part, the men you know are awful. If you’re lucky, they are unfaithful, but the bright star of their charisma makes you believe in a better world. If you’re not, they are physically or emotionally abusive. Most men sit somewhere in the middle: your ex who tells you he loves you without looking you in the eye because he’d like to have sex with you in the pub toilet. A friend who insults you as a form of flirtation. The regular at the bar you work at who apparently likes watching a video of two Japanese women in a bath being sick in each other’s mouths. Men are disappointing in a myriad of different ways, which is unfortunate since you and every other woman you know are heterosexual. It’s the early ‘00s and you’re in a Gwendoline Riley novel. 

Riley’s early books are good on Manchester — Kendals department store (now House of Fraser), a wintry slush-lined Oxford Road, a dual carriageway in Salford, Stockport train station, the sort of conversations you overhear on the bus. But they’re even better — funnier, sadder, spikier— on love. In Sick Notes, her second novel, we get two different versions of what a night of passion might look like. In one scene, the protagonist Esther’s best friend Donna regales her with a story about “twelve hours of true love on a damp mattress”, rolling around on toast crumbs in a room with a non-functioning gas fire: “...and my arms were cold outside the blanket, and the blanket smelt of sick […] and there were no curtains but the whole world felt warm and buttered in this emotional haze.” Esther is unimpressed: Donna is a propagandist with no inner life, she jokes.

Riley poses an alternative a little later. A Scottish bartender, Mary, isn’t especially wowed by the men on offer in the city: “Sweet Jesus… I don’t think I have high standards, I just want someone to entertain me for half an hour or so with conversation, and they’re always a fucking disappointment.” She doesn’t want to talk to them or to learn their stupid names. There’s a solution, though: “Make them lick your fanny, then kick them out in the gutter,” Mary says.

Riley grew up in the Wirral, but moved to Manchester to study English Literature at MMU before embarking on their creative writing masters programme. Her excellent debut novel Cold Water was published in 2002. Unfortunately for her, she was 23 years old and beautiful. ‘Unfortunately’, because these two details seemed to warp the critical reception her early work received: 3:AM dubbed her “Camus in hotpants”, while the Sunday Times featured her in a bizarre 2004 article about reading being cool again (‘Hip lit fiction’s fashion moment’), describing her author photo as being “of a 25-year-old, thrift-chic Mancunian photogene who looks as if she could quote Nabokov, but also drinks too much Guinness and probably lost her virginity in the back of a vintage Volkswagen Beetle on the hard shoulder, with the Smiths on the stereo”.

In the early years, there seemed some uncertainty about what to make of Riley, resulting in a rash of comparisons. The Observer called her “Manchester’s answer to Bukowski”, the Independent on Sunday considered her a “contemporary Carson McCullers”, The Times described her writing with “a Woolf-ish exactitude”. She was paralleled with Jean Rhys, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marguerite Duras. It wasn’t until a decade into publishing that critics seemed to get it. “I would humbly submit that Gwendoline Riley writes like herself,” Stuart Kelly wrote in The Scotsman in 2012. “The comparisons may be flattering and may even be apposite, but they occlude what is an assured, distinctive and singular style.”

These days, Riley — now based in London — is one of Britain’s most well-respected novelists. Her work receives the sort of painstaking and careful analysis it always demanded — her last novel, My Phantoms (2021), got write ups in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the New Yorker. These newer books are tonally different: they’re much more polished, colder, and crueller (Why be churlish? They’re better books, frankly). But while her first two novels, Cold Water and Sick Notes, are not, technically speaking, perfectly written (they err twee in places; manic pixie dream girl in others — plus there are paragraphs that function as adverts for the indie-girl shoe of choice of the time, Converse All Stars), they are still amazing books. It’s mad to imagine an early twenty-something writing either of them. 

I read them at 16, after reading the stupid Times article. The piece had enraged me, a teenager who was reliably po-faced about Art — the idea of reading being a trend, like combat trousers or highlights, had made me feel a bit sick. If Riley’s books were part of the literary-fashion complex, I didn’t want anything to do with them. A friend had set me straight — her books were very good, he’d said. You’ll love them. He’d lent both books to me and I’d read them one after the other in a single day.

This sounds laid on very thick, but I mean every word of it — Riley’s first two novels were a miracle to me. Manchester was not drowning in glamour in 2004. The reign of the Smiths and the Haçienda had retreated in the rear-view mirror, and now we had, what? The Trafford Centre? A wealth of Costa Coffees? As a teenager, I thought novels had to be set in Paris or New York or Rio de Janeiro; had to centre on dramatic plots, divorces and adventure and espionage. Riley was writing about a reality that was familiar to me: Market Street (where I worked Saturdays, handing out job papers), the Star and Garter (where I went out most weekends), Central Library. She wrote about women who lead lives not so dissimilar to my own — they read constantly, wrote a little, went to gigs and drank too much and had very tepid romantic entanglements which bowled them over emotionally. In this way, these novels were a jolt of electricity. Up until that point, I hadn’t realised that my life — the same life I so badly wanted to fast-forward, so I could get to the good bits — could be meaningful enough to be the stuff of fiction.

In both books, almost every character, regardless of age, is single — something perhaps reflective of Riley’s own circumstances at the time, writing these while working in bars (in interviews, she tends to bristle at the inference that her novels are about her life, but concedes that she writes what she knows). But her plethora of single characters doesn’t mean that they’re unconcerned with romance. In Cold Water, Carmel comes home to an answer machine message from her friend Katja: “‘I’m reading Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. He says You will always be in love, you will always be in love with love. A grand passion is the privilege of those with nothing to do. Ding dong.’”

Maybe that’s it, really — the ‘nothing to do’ part being so key to being in love with love. Because these characters — like teenagers, like students — have all the time in the world to get into elaborate entanglements, to think deeply, to feel a lot. ’00s Manchester may not have seemed riddled with glamour at the time, but the economics of the period enable most of the characters to lead the sort of bohemian lives that, two decades on, seem near extinct to those devoid of family money.

Katja, for example, collects her dole money once a week, and “after paying her bills she spent the remainder, which was very little, on books, films, music, magazines. On weekday afternoons she might draw the curtains and watch old films on Channel 4, or bang out poetry on her typewriter. She lived on soup and toast, coffee and biscuits.” Carmel, the protagonist, works as a bartender and makes enough to live in a flatshare in Withington with just one friend, Margi. Speaking of — Margi, who works at the same bar as Carmel, disappears off to Buxton on holiday for a couple of weeks without telling her boss and still has her job when she gets back. 

This way of living struck a chord — as a teenager, I was a prodigy at doing very little. Days in bed reading and nights out drinking. My favourite ever summer, home from university at 19 and on the dole for a couple of months — I’d meet up with friends at Wetherspoons, we’d sunbathe in Piccadilly Gardens when the weather was good. Maybe I loved the novels because the way of life seemed familiar. I remember plenty of yearning, too, though the specifics are blurry: it’s hard, now, to remember who would have justified such a glut of emotion — my not-great ex-boyfriend? Somebody from a night out?

In an interview about Sick Notes, Riley cites the influence of The Brothers Karamazov, and notes “there's a passage about how love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. That's what Esther's love has to remain — love in dreams.” This theme isn’t limited to Sick Notes, though. Both of her first novels are populated by single characters who are more in love with the idea of love, a grand passion, than they are with the workaday reality of being in a relationship. A divorced character tells Carmel that he and his ex-wife “were like Scott and Zelda… We spun out. We couldn’t hold it together.”

Margi is unembarrassed by her teenage response to a much older boyfriend unceremoniously finishing with her — she leaves an orchid on his doormat and instructs him to watch it die and think of her. “‘Well, I was seventeen, I was a romantic…’ she shrugs.” Carmel’s mum spends years mooning over the ex-boyfriend she had prior to meeting Carmel’s dad, and eventually finds the courage to contact him. But the reality doesn’t match the fantasy built up over the decades that have elapsed: when she comes home from a restaurant date with him, she realises she isn’t attracted to him. In Sick Notes, Esther and Donna have to stop at Waterstones because Donna has a crush on the boy at the biography desk. “‘Don't look,’ she says. ‘We'll stand by that display table and I'll just ache in his direction.’”

How can you blame them? Through the lens of these novels, yearning looks painful but delicious — so why do anything else? At the Star and Garter, Esther meets an American musician, Newton, who’s touring the UK. We know he’s only in Manchester for the night, but this doesn’t stop her falling headlong for him from the get go. Riley is excellent on the electricity of an all-consuming crush: the way that love or something like it is nothing more than giving someone the full gift of your attention. We see Newton through her eyes, as placed under a microscope: “When he said that he squeezed one side of his face up and smiled. A fantastic smile, really. His mouth all dark and scored looking… he smiles and nods and looks at me sideways. He's a scruff: his whole demeanour makes me think of pinching a pigeon feather and brushing it backwards.”

They go to bed together and meet the next day, and Riley conjures up the way a person might lose all control — and how giddying that can be. In the pub, waiting for him, she keeps smiling for him and then trying to hide it and then just grinning even more. “My throat keeps tightening with happiness and then I have to laugh out loud and look at my hands and wonder what's going on.” Then, mid-conversation, suspiciously casually, Newton decimates her. He mentions this girl Renee, who he’s “not dating per se”, but who he’s already cheated on twice. Esther wants to leave and knows if she had any self-respect she’d do so: “My heart beats faster, trips up on itself; at the thought that I could just stand up and walk out…But I don't move. Because how can I leave a room that he's in? Come on, How could I ever leave a room that he's in?“

There’s a kind of magic to being single, even if it’s seeded with agony — especially if it’s seeded with agony, early Riley might argue. Everything’s up in the air; anything at all could happen. Riley’s single characters might be fantasists, and might be incapable of the steadier thrill of a long-term relationship, but they seem twice as alive as anyone else. Seen through their eyes, the everyday — not just men, but friends, places, music — is lit up from within by romance. On waiting for a tram in St Peter’s Square, Carmel observes how in the winter sun “the tram rails stretching down to Salford shone white. The puddles were like silver leaf. I always felt romantic on days like that, with in-between weather. They gave me an electric feeling.” Later, watching her friend dance in a small white cloud of dry ice puffed out from their bar’s ailing smoke machine, Carmel thinks, “When I’ve said that I was ‘in thrall’ of Margi part of what I mean is that I wanted to dance with her in that cloud of smoke, to be in her world.” 

As a teenager, I was often — not unreasonably — told to toughen up, to try to cultivate a thicker skin. I’ve always been emotional and at 16, I was juddering with sentiment and hormones. Riley’s early work felt like a refuge. It suggested that this thing about you, which might feel like an obstacle stopping you from moving smoothly through the world, was actually to your advantage. At the end of Sick Notes, Esther confides in Donna that she feels so romantic and furious all the bloody time. But that’s not so terrible, Donna points out. Maybe it’s even an asset? She’d like to feel those things sometimes, but she doesn’t, or she can’t. The book tips its cap to one of literature’s heroic yearners, Jay Gatsby. “You believe in the green light,” Donna says, “and I think that’s great.”