Gwendoline Riley - Opposed Positions (2012)
Gwendoline Riley has been working steadily for a decade now. Her first novel, Cold Water, set the tone for the work to come: young woman, adrift in their lives, stumbling between one romantic fling to another, drinking too much, and generally failing in life. Aislinn Kelly, like Carmel McKisco before, treads a similar path, but is more successful. She has published three novels – not too much acclaim or success it seems (unlike Riley, who has won the Betty Trask Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and is about to decamp to America, where she hopes to feel free once more. America featured prominently in Riley’s last novel, Joshua Spassky, but here it seems nothing more than a country of false promises. Aislinn Kelly’s life is failing, and so are her dreams. Opposed Positions is a real maturation of Riley’s talents. Though a slight novel (it is 230 pages with wide margins) it packs quite t...