Written by Sally Rooney, published in 2017, and superbly narrated in my audio-version by Aoife McMahon, this is a novel about power, and the complex ways we exercise and experience it in our personal relationships.

The book's title is highly ironic. The "conversations" it dishes up are mostly hard, cold, scratchy things, and the "friends" it portrays are distinctly double-edged beings, who definitely don't always act in a conventionally friendly way.

There are four key characters, whose trajectories intersect on multiple levels. Frances (the narrator) is the former girlfriend of Bobbi (the two are still friends and do spoken word performances together, and they do eventually get back together, although they don't label themselves "girlfriends"). Melissa is a writer, who befriends Frances and Bobbi; she is married to Nick, an actor. Frances and Nick begin an affair.

The power the characters exert over each other is hard to measure (as, indeed, power is difficult to measure in international relations), because it is split into so many elements, all of which work in different ways.

Is Frances powerful? Well, she has no real power over the illness that is diagnosed during the course of the narrative, or over Bobbi, or over the sad figure of her father. She has only limited power over Nick, who chooses to remain with Melissa. But he can't escape Frances. At the end, it looks as though the affair will be regenerated. She is a less glittering figure than Bobbi, and more willing to be "encouragingly polite". Yet there is power also in a lack of threat, and she's not necessarily encouraging or polite to Nick...

Is Nick powerful? On the one hand, he is powerless in face of Frances, to whom he seems in thrall. On the other hand, his strange, dependent relationship with Melissa also gives him power over Frances, because he will always be unobtainable, elusive -- and therefore unforgettable. More prosaically, he is so much older than Frances, so much more established in life, so much more in a position to provide materially, that their relationship is likely to always be lop-sided. (He does end up "keeping" her at one point, although she pays the money back.)

Is Bobbi powerful? She's fiercely intellectual, always ready to argue, never open to being messed with, never ready to commit -- simply for the sake of being polite or pleasant -- to anything that her razor-sharp analysis of society can't endorse. But her hold over Frances is obviously incomplete. Frances is looking for more than Bobbi can give her, as her delight at Nick's accidental phone call at the end makes clear.

Is Melissa powerful? She exerts power over Nick, that's for sure. She seems to see him as needy and weak (especially after his bout of mental illness the previous year), and he certainly never seems to assert himself against her. (In her somewhat mean-spirited communication to Frances towards the end, she describes him as pathologically quiescent, which is possibly not far off the mark, but I don't think she realizes quite how much power that position actually grants him...) Melissa likes to manipulate events and relationships (managing the house-party in France; sending Frances' story -- about Bobbi -- to Bobbi...) But she comes across, by the end, as somewhat pathetic, of all the characters perhaps the least able to get what she wants (which, despite what she says, is exclusive access to Nick).


As we took no photos of the trip we did to Dublin, back when 1995 was fading into 1996, here are various views of Ireland from 1992



The narrator, Frances, comes across very differently, depending on whether she's talking to us or to others. To us, she's very open. She's clearly vulnerable, struggling with money, with her health, with an alcoholic and depressive father, and with the constant comparison that is Bobbi. To others, she's cutting, pathologically shut-down and secretive, and formulaically political, a mini-version of Bobbi. Only at the end, in her conversations with Melissa (expressing apology) and with Nick (expressing openness and need), does she come across with any warmth.

Commenting on the book's style in an interview with Michael Nolan, Rooney notes that Frances' style reflects her cultural position as an arts student who has been exposed to certain textual influences: "She reads cultural theory and that informs how she looks at the world as much as literary prose... Sometimes I think that it’s maybe reaching an audience that aren’t necessarily familiar with the texts that influence the style." Rooney is therefore sometimes surprised at the influences others think they detect: "But maybe in a way that’s because it sits in that awkward position between being quite an accessible read, and also having a heritage of influence that’s not necessarily so accessible."

I wouldn't consider myself particularly familiar with those influential texts. And as I was progressing through the book, I kept asking myself whether or not I actually liked it. It was very easy to listen to, and I enjoyed having those beautiful Irish cadences lilting along in my ears. I also definitely wanted to know what would happen, and how (or whether) this tangled set of relationships would be resolved (I was disappointed at Nick's accidental reappearance at the end, and Frances' keenness to open the door to all that again). But none of the characters is particularly likeable, and I would often find myself annoyed by their self-indulgence (either you're with someone or you're not, so make your mind up; if you want to subvert capitalism, stop sponging on people, and do something genuinely altruistic and different; if you're sick, get help, and for God's sake, eat properly...).

By the end, however, I'd decided I did like it. Life's like that, after all. Messy, incomplete, unresolved, full of humans who do the wrong thing (either through stubborn wilfulness and selfishness, or because they haven't a clue what is the right thing).

It's definitely bleak. On the one hand, the settings are quite refined. Cafes; nice houses; flats that are not luxurious but OK, definitely not squalid (with the exception of Frances' father's grubby and neglected pad); university libraries; borrowed beach houses in France... Many of the issues the book discusses are very much first-world problems. On the other hand, there's a sense of hollowness and coldness that rarely dissipates. It's a messed-up world we live in. According to Alexandra Schwartz, "Capitalism is to Rooney’s young women what Catholicism was to [James] Joyce’s young men, a rotten national faith to contend with, though how exactly to resist capitalism, when it has sunk its teeth so deep into the human condition, remains an open question."

But I'd also agree with Claire Kilroy: "Rooney writes so well of the condition of being a young, gifted but self-destructive woman, both the mentality and physicality of it. She is alert to the invisible bars imprisoning the apparently free... Her hyperarticulate characters may fail to communicate their fragile selves, but Rooney does it for them in a voice distinctively her own."

I'll definitely be back for more.