The Mess We're In by Annie McManus
Overview: Orla moves from Dublin to London, into a house with a school friend and the friend's brother's band. This creates a lively environment for her to get used to a new city and a helpful in as Orla attempts to build a career in music. Back home, her family is crumbling, and Orla struggles to find her footing when the home base she's always known isn't waiting for her anymore. Overall: 3
Characters: 2 All of these characters are ideas of people, but they're never elevated to have any animating force. Orla and the book's biggest problem is that she has almost no agency. Everything happens to Orla without her input and the most she ever reacts is to get a bit mad and wound up. She doesn't express much depth of feeling and seems generally indifferent to her life. She often loses her memory to capacious amounts of drugs, and while some fairly traumatic things happen because of this, she doesn't seem bothered in the slightest. She has these dreams of being a music producer but only follows that when it's convenient to tell the people in her orbit, "hey, by the way." She's also passive in her friendships and relationships, which makes it hard to be invested in the path of any of them. Orla exists nearly as a ghost in her life and everyone else's, which doesn't make for a compelling main character.
Everyone else feels as flat as Orla. Her friend Neema is moving to London for a full ride to law school, already sorted to a potential firm. She's put together and finds Orla's messiness grating. As the book goes along, we find out the girls aren't as good of friends as Orla once believed, but everything feels shallow between them. The three members of the band create a lot of noise around Orla but aren't very developed. Kesh in Neema's brother and the lead singer. The other two are less distinctive. Frank is only ever really identified by his hair. Then various people from the label and recording studio flesh out the friend group. Nothing goes beyond the surface, and everyone is fairly forgettable and inessential to the story.
Orla's connections to home are slightly more compelling. Her mother is struggling with the news of divorce and that her ex-husband is having a child with his mistress. Her sister isn't coping great either, but they're so removed that it's hard to get invested in their story through the often featured phone calls. Orla's central conflict is with her father, who is tied to her forever by giving her the gift of music, but he mostly comes across as a background story. Pat, the pub owner who hires Orla and the crew at the bar are the most compelling additions, but again, their presence is limited.
Plot: 2 I kept waiting for this book to begin. This sense was strongest in the first 100 pages where I kept thinking, this is way too much set up. The author clearly did not start in the right place. As I turned the last page, I still felt like the story had never begun, but I understood the problem better. It wasn't just that it didn't start in the right place, but the writing style and the aims for the plot were in direct opposition. It seems like McManus wanted to write a slice of life novel, the kind of literary fare you see from a writer like Ottessa Moshfegh who takes writing a drug-fueled haze to the extreme. But that's not the novel she wrote. There's not enough craft in the writing to pull off the "nothing happens" thing in a satisfying way. It's written like a fast, quick, fun commercial novel. Think Dolly Alderton. Not the most polished but promising an engrossing, quick read. I thought that we'd see Orla chasing her musical ambitions alongside the band as she became one with London. Orla isn't a developed enough character to carry a thought novel, and McManus doesn't even choose the right scenes for one of those books. Yet, there's no real plot to speak of, like an Alderton novel does. None of the scenes seem to have a point or any build. It all feels randomly assigned. She tries to pull an ending of Orla coming to terms with her family situation and making a step with her music, but it all feels hollow with nothing to back it up. I should've called it when I was 100 pages in feeling like the author was entirely out of control.
Writing: 3 This is a book that could've greatly benefited from a better editor and just more development from the author. Everything about this book is having a bit of an identity crisis. Dialogue is denoted with — marks, something I've seen before and have no issue with. But McManus uses the dash and then adds random dialogue tags or bits of description afterwards instead of using them to isolate the dialogue as they're typically used. This makes the dialogue feel really clunky and confused. The writing itself felt entirely underbaked and like someone who just hadn't had enough practice with language to feel entirely comfortable, and I think that also contributes to the depth and plot issues.
It's unfortunate because the writing itself reads quickly. It has that perfect beach read pacing, which was why I pressed on when I identified the early issues. As time goes on and you realize the book is going nowhere, it gets harder to want to read the book, but it's such an easy read that it makes it easier to forgive the very obvious flaws. It's funny how the Goodreads reviews seem to widely note that the book bursting with drug use. I don't have a problem with this, but the depictions throughout the book that the author clearly thinks are fundamental just further drive home the superficiality of the writing. Nearly every time a character does a line it's "hoovered." There's little originality in the language, and I noticed that certain descriptions were repeated even on the same page. And, when there's little insight, depth of feeling, or scene setting produced by the capacious mentions of drug use, I guess I can see where complaints would arise.
I can't say I'd recommend this one. I've read far better books set in London, books by Irish authors, and books set in London by Irish authors. I bought this at Books Upstairs in Dublin, and every book I bought there (except one nonfiction title) came from their Irish literature display, and every other book I picked up that day utterly blew me away, so this feels especially like a let down.
Doing some googling after and finding out that she's a DJ who's already famous makes me understand a bit more how such an underbaked book came into the world.
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