Her boyfriend leaves for work, and Áine Ward is left alone, a miserable woman in a miserable home. She knew that any affordable flat would be mouldy, but the mould in the one she and Elliott share is a “green horror” that regrows faster than it can be scrubbed away. The flat upstairs contains a wailing woman, always heard but inexplicably never seen, and an overcoated man, never heard but seen inexplicably frequently. So begins I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There, the debut novel from the 33-year-old journalist Róisín Lanigan. Lanigan, having once ranked Britain’s male journalists by height in the Fence magazine, can expect her debut novel to find a press at least one-quarter hostile, but there is still much cause for optimism.
Home, for Áine, the narrator and protagonist, long ago ceased to be the Belfast family home or crumby university accommodation. And at the book’s start, it is ceasing to be the subsequent standard twenty-something arrangement: the grad-job London flatshare. Her flatmate and best friend, one of those people “who walked through life golden”, is moving into a houseboat with her soon-to-be fiancé. The only other person Áine has to live with is her boyfriend Elliott, a “good person” who takes her outside, reminds her to drink water, and cares for her “like a little plant he tends to”. The two met at work, but Áine has been disengaged from her job since Elliott changed his. Some time into the story, Áine is granted permission to work from home full-time. Suddenly she has a lot of time alone in the new flat, and must contend with the pressures of her life: relationships, family, finances and much more.
“That is my life,” Áine thinks, looking at her packed boxes. She is a graduate in 2010s London. Friends like “barbecues, fantasy football, macramé, Facebook, the crying laughing emoji, burrata, heterosexuality, Lewis Capaldi, the help-to-buy scheme”. A house 8-feet wide sells for £1.3m. Anyone without “money, smiling mothers, fathers in suits” is left “treading water alone”. Full-time work from home means no more “paying for public transport or buying overpriced stale supermarket sandwiches”. WhatsApp conversations measure a relationship and pleasure is found in “being unseen and unperceived”. Inserting the coil is shockingly painful, and pretending to like choking during sex an obligatory performance. Lanigan has her characters and their point in time nailed: New Labour dead, Elizabeth Windsor alive, smartphones total, Covid unforeseen. It is exciting to see this period, only recently defined, already recorded so attentively.
But if an overthinking anhedonic young female protagonist who spends all day online, neglects her health, and worry-clenches her fist to the point of drawing blood sounds a bit more like the incumbent great Irish writer than the next, this book also has banshees and demons and zombies and vampires and ghosts. Lanigan’s ambition here seems to be to test the limits of the millennial novel. Her caustic social commentary is undercut by a supernatural mystery horror. Strange apparitions and paranormal intrusions lift the novel into a atypically fantastical realm, and its highest pleasures come when Lanigan leaves behind familiar clipped prose and plunges headlong into gothic deliria.
There is the occasional case of notebook double dipping: “Days when she could lie in bed all day, intermittently scrolling the mousepad to appear ‘active’,” are followed 60 pages later by a period when Áine would “lie on their macabre iron-wrought bed, moving her fingers on the mousepad intermittently so it would seem like she was working”. Nice images like this, and smart coinages such as the “Tinderification” of the housing market would stand a little better if only made once.
And yet Lanigan daringly sustains the book’s mystery. We never quite know whether Áine is psychotic or haunted. The answer is never slipped to the reader behind the character’s back. Of course, if you were psychotic or haunted, you also would not know which it was either. The decision forces a reckoning with the subject matter, and testifies to the writer’s ambition. I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There is a document of hellish times and a map of our relationships with others, ourselves, and our demons – metaphorical and literal.
I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There
Róisín Lanigan
Penguin, 278pp, £16.99
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