Murky Effects

A novel of desire and domestic disorder amid a disintegrating literary establishment.

By Isabella Gullifer-LaurieMay 18, 2026

• Fiction

THE FIRST PAGE attends to “murky effects.” A man and woman trudge along Southwark Bridge under “a dark yellow sky—like iodine—and brownish clouds, mounted in flat, extravagant, painterly puffs.” It is a literary fog: a cousin to Charles Dickens’s smoky “London particular” and the meteorological considerations in Middlemarch (1872) that hint at mental weather. In Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House (2026), the sky is hurricane-whipped from Saharan sand, from drifting fire ash in Spain and Portugal. Laura walks oblivious. “Well, it’s a storm now,” says Putnam. The winds of chance, a quotidian disturbance.

Riley’s novels are distinctive for their trying climates. Characters go to sleep in chilly marital beds, wake up in houses ravaged by meanness and spite. Everyone is battered and bruised, their temperaments shaped by having weathered the storms of childhood and youth. Riley’s seventh novel, The Palm House, attaches itself to scenes of aftermath, with a weird, static state of in-betweenness. Her previous books, including the recent First Love (2017) and My Phantoms (2021), tangle furtively in matters of desire and domestic disorder. This one does too, but it takes up workplace precarity and a disintegrating literary establishment as its themes.

Putnam is a middle-aged editor who has quit his role at a preeminent literary journal in protest and despair. His father has died. Sequence has been taken over by a “thick-skinned philistine,” Simon “Shove” Halfpenny. His vision is to turn the magazine into The New Yorker for Brits: “He had been managing editor of a sports title. The board had moved him across.” Laura, our narrator, has written a few scant pieces for Sequence but is a regular at their Friday drinks, populated by editors and writers in need of “a bit of society.” Riley, as ever, is interested in the little fizzles of tension and tenderness that occur in any relationship, turning from her usual pairing of struggling lovers, or mothers and daughters, to consider the hazy ties of friendship.

Putnam is on the rocks. “I’m for the scrap heap now,” he says to Laura: “Just another bloke knocking about the Western world.” Fingering crisps and wine in pubs—later over a homemade curry, and in a greasy spoon over egg and chips—they discuss the material problems of his resignation, a temporary spell which has lapsed into months of stasis. Theirs is a bond with collegiate shades; Putnam is not afraid to pull rank on Laura, nearly a decade his junior at 40. Taken up with the sad and amusing convulsions of his middle years, Putnam is hostile and tipsy: “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.”

Stilted dialogue is Riley’s métier. Conversation has an exhausted, domestic quality. People talk aggressively past each other, communication persistently fails. How can friends lack fluency in some shared social tongue? Laura thinks herself cold water, a rigorous and straightforward antidote to Putnam’s excess of glum. It’s a formidable, unforgiving task. As Laura explains it, “Our conversations would keep landing there, when I least expected it: it was like falling through a trapdoor into a punishment cell.” This theme of thanklessness returns: “I used to feel, at those times, talking to him, as if I were trying to climb a steep sand dune, while he stood on the crest: exultant in his misery.” In this state of “sheer bloody-mindedness,” she thinks, he has surrendered rather inelegantly to life.

And living seems a difficult thing. Putnam is one among a handful of editors in this book who are both frightened and fed up, destroyed by precarity and the specter of financial hardship. The unlived life, for Putnam, has a kind of heroic validity. (“Putnam was forty-nine! […] [H]ad he not spent a good proportion of those years reading, thinking, watching films? Had none of that given him an inkling of how to face life?”). Riley’s narrators are frequently underpaid or insecurely employed; her books churn with anxiety about money and social mobility. The literary magazine heralds an insular form of cultural capital, a rare thing for its “esprit de corps, the all-in, let’s-save-the-youth-club dedication they brought to each new issue.” Laura herself is an editor at a shabby history magazine, a low-grade publication with which Putnam is “loudly unimpressed.” The demise of Sequence suggests an industry falling in on itself, prey to the mediocre values and foul mismanagement of its managerial class. “There’s always money for nonsense, isn’t there?” someone asks over beer.

Riley has been interested in failure and vice since her 2002 debut Cold Water. Her attention to the bullshit of life is absolute. Characters can be deceitful, hypocritical, prone to pretentiousness and duplicity. Satisfaction and disappointment transform them, augmenting certain proclivities and behavioral tendencies to a deforming degree. Walking through life confused and injuring people left and right, they seem to be equal in intelligence and idiocy.

Relationships are described with a startling efficiency: this one ringed with embarrassment, that one trading in the diminished currency of affection. Scattered in Riley’s books are stinging aperçus that cue a bitter laughter, such as this from My Phantoms: “My mother loved rules. She loved rules and codes and fixed expectations. I want to say—as a dog loves an airborne stick.” In the world of Riley, parents self-sabotage, while children bring themselves up. The fathers are absent, brutish, or dead. The mothers are enthusiastically judgmental, blind to their own folly and weakness, demanding and pitiable. More often than not, the love interest is a deflated figure of mediocrity and wasted talent, or gross privilege. Riley’s novels, despite their drifting domestic focus, lack things such as siblings, friends, good sex, and hearty meals.

Like her earlier books, The Palm House is steeped in the lumpy, benign factuality of pubs, buses, chips, beer, dirty bedrooms, borrowed couches. Rainy Sunday afternoons are loops of emotional torture, close to the stodgy ones of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, the sawtooth edge of wasted hours found in the work of Rosamond Lehmann. How these women sit on barstools and wait for their future to arrive! Riley’s protagonists have an unfinished quality, finding themselves lost in lingering astonishment at how things have made out. They don’t seem to know how to gain and hold attention, and they display strange temperamental contradictions, being astute as well as vacant. They behave as atrociously as any terrible mother or boyfriend and have an ambivalent relationship to the emotional needs of their familiars. Discursions into family history and childhood memories—a prominent feature in Riley’s work—expose the wriggling underside.

One senses that Laura has built her life on sand. She is typical of Riley’s narrators, but most akin to Bridget of My Phantoms, who seemed steady, solid, and not quite so prone to masochism or hostility. Roughly half of The Palm House is devoted to brief sequences outlining Laura’s youth in Liverpool with her mother and grandmother, the rest to her adult years in London. Over these earlier scenes hovers a quiet fantasy of stability and a desire to cease owing anybody anything, neither love nor money. She recounts a childhood holiday to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where her warts are rinsed by a fortune teller and she buys some ugly shoes. She attends a party, recalls a cluster flat she lived in on Maple Street. She meets with her mother at a pub before Christmas, a brief, uncomfortable encounter. She sips tea and juice with a friend, Katherine, and her children in the summer afternoon. She rents a room from a wealthy producer, who makes sure she feels her material disadvantage at being a guest. This is all dry and light, but Riley finds the terror in people, their ugly need to exhibit.

Laura is surrounded by pretenders. Performing for others is almost a sin in Riley’s books, not quite a moral failing but a deadly requirement. Life makes actors of us all. People have a weakness for playing their parts, and they suffer from it. Riley has an ear for people who take this to an extreme, who overdo their roles, who play the ham. In My Phantoms, Bridget’s mother attends to the man she has invited for dinner at their flat: “‘And would you like a drink?’ my mother said, as Dave handed her his coat and smiled at us. ‘Or a … radish, or … You want it, we got it,’ she said, in her Italian restaurant owner voice. ‘We gotta the radishes, we gotta the nuts!” she said.’”

Laura’s mother also “does voices,” framed as the vulgar symptom of a showy nature. She would “call out hopelessly, and in a strange accent, ‘Speak-a to Charlie!’” Her mother is always putting it on:

She did a lot of shouting up those stairs. If she was going to go to Asda after work: “Anyone need anything? Now is the last call!” she’d shout. “Speak now or forever hold your peace!”

“Going once!” she’d shout, “Going twice! No?”

Laura has a dalliance with a plummy-voiced actor named Lawrence Wells, who calls for “water!” after they have sex. Everything he utters has a witty, grating charm. “Shan’t!” he proclaims when told he should eat salad instead of steak. Riley does not do nice, homely little scenes—the domestic is stripped of its literary romance.

The longest chapter of The Palm House is devoted to Laura’s adolescent infatuation with a midwit comedian, whom she listens to on Channel 4: “Because he was sensitive; because he was alive to beauty and cruelty, Chris Patrick moved about the world in a state of near-ecstatic personal pain.” Laura sends him cassette recordings of her voice, talking about school and her mother, and combs magazines to read his interviews. At 14, she attends one of his stand-up performances, where he talks about football and his ex-girlfriend, and waits to meet him at the stage door with her older friend, Anna. They are singled out by Chris Patrick—“‘Laura, Laura, Laura,’ he said. ‘Now is it you what sends them tapes?’”—who gives them more tickets for his shows. The girls spend time in his dressing room, eat crisps on his knee. He gives them drinks and chauffeured rides in his car. He invites them both, separately, to visit him at home.

Laura, in new underwear (“Ooh, lucky Chris!” offers her mother), sets off for his house only to find Chris Patrick snorting a line of cocaine. Gripping her shoulders, he ushers her into a dark and dirty bedroom. “Then he chanted my name,” she recounts, “as if I were a footballer about to take a free kick: ‘Lau-ra! Lau-ra! Lau-ra!’” He proceeds to undress and film her and describe her genitals: “‘And them’s your labia,’ he said. (I didn’t know the word.) He said they were so small they looked ‘like a little pound coin.’” The sex, according to Chris Patrick, is not “’mazing,” and he recommends she buy a cream for thrush at Boots.

This episode is the numb heart of the novel, pushing its ugly head out of the soil. What does it mean, alongside the discursive narrative of Putnam and Sequence? It has an urgency, a persistence of feeling, resurfacing with the intensity of a beach ball held underwater. It is also striking, in this setting of coercive sex, that Laura comes closer to exhibiting something like energy or willpower than elsewhere in the book. Her teenage self rationalizes it as such: “I had made this happen, I thought. I had sent those tapes. I had picked him out, in a way.” She acts the part, in other words. Laura starts with disillusionment, that through line of all Riley’s protagonists. Her novels are concerned with the sustained, emotional arc of experience, and the way the form can capture this ongoingness. Aftermath is a longstanding state, with no beginning nor end.

Riley’s novels have often traded in the problem of sympathy, its inability to enlarge her characters’ worlds, its ridiculous purchase on readers. The relationship between Putnam and Laura has a sympathetic savor: they share a fidelity and devotion uncommon to her work. The title of The Palm House is drawn from their shared plan to take Putnam’s father to visit the ancient cycad in the Victorian glasshouse in Kew Gardens. The visit does not eventuate, but the structure becomes emblematic of their relationship: sustaining steam, precious humidity, green plants striving toward the light in their revitalized sheltered state. Not leaving her characters out in the wretched, foggy cold marks something new for Riley. Her endings usually have a fatalistic note, the finality of a gavel. Over dinner, Putnam and Laura look out onto the “little oasis” of his downstairs neighbor, who tends to tropical plants:

“Well these aren’t high-maintenance, presumably,” I said.

“No, they aren’t. But there are things to do. No, they thrive on neglect. That was Liv’s phrase. I quite liked that.”

“But not total neglect,” he said. “Not abandonment.”