One can go​ long stretches without reading a contemporary novel in which children are vividly present, but parents – old, decrepit, dying or recently deceased – have seemed inescapable of late. Gwendoline Riley’s recent novels are a case in point. In First Love (2017) the narrator, Neve, contends with her galling, gallivanting mother while coming to the realisation that the sickly older man she married in the wake of her vicious father’s death is cast in the same sadistic mould. In My Phantoms (2021) another mother and daughter – Hen and Bridge (their names become a shorthand for their roles) – perform a perpetually wrong-footed pas de deux, which ends with Hen trapped in a hoist in a nursing home on her daughter’s final visit. The Palm House, Riley’s seventh novel, reshuffles many of the same elements, but the parental anecdotes are mostly background to the story of the friendship between two barbed middle-aged colleagues, Edmund and Laura.

The feeling of entropy and drift, of being superannuated amid global chaos, hangs over these characters. In the opening scene they notice a yellow sky from their perch in the pub; a Saharan dust storm has turned the atmosphere sepia. The year is 2017. Edmund Putnam is the 49-year-old deputy editor of a London magazine, Sequence, that has just appointed a new editor. He’s about thirty and his name says it all: Simon Halfpenny, or ‘Shove’. ‘At his first editorial meeting, Shove – I’ll use “Shove” – said that what he’d like to do was to turn Sequence into the New Yorker. “A sort of London version of the New Yorker,” he explained.’ Laura is only a decade younger than Putnam, but the generational gulf seems vast: he’s been working at Sequence for 25 years; she’s a freelancer, resigned to itinerancy and financial precarity. Laura looks to Putnam less for mentorship than for proximity to a bygone era of gravitas and stability (if not sobriety). When she finally lands a part-time editing job at a middlebrow history magazine, Putnam scoffs. But ‘I had somewhere to go,’ she tells us. ‘Some money arrived every month. That strain of worry was gone. I could pay bills and make choices. I could feel like a person.’

By this point, Putnam has left Sequence, surprising everyone. ‘Listen, it’s time,’ he says. ‘Long past time, probably.’ The echo of T.S. Eliot (‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME’) nicely clocks Putnam as a man of letters and of London. He shows Laura the spot outside his office building that had been bombed in September 1940: ‘I had a photo by my desk for years. Stunning picture. Just a section of wall still standing. There,’ he indicates, ‘in a sea of rubble and scorched timber. This black wall.’ Later, Laura muses: ‘After work, if I wanted to think about the future, I might have a drink in one of those dark-wood, etched-glass Victorian pubs near Pimlico, sitting on a wobbling stool by the wall.’ ‘Welcome to mid-career,’ her friend Vik says. ‘Everyone cares just that little bit less about anything you say or do.’ Or as Eliot himself wrote: ‘And bats with baby faces in the violet light/Whistled, and beat their wings/And crawled head downwards down a blackened wall.’

One doesn’t read Riley for plot; each book is an assemblage of episodes. She wields dialogue like a Swiss army knife, now corkscrewed, now serrated, but always coming to a short, sharp point. Her characters are divided between those who are keenly interested in mulling over the past and those who are dulled by obliviousness. ‘Into the past,’ Putnam says to Laura at the opening of The Palm House. ‘We used to live in here, in 1984.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘Nicer then.’ ‘Of course.’

Much is left unspoken in the scenes where Putnam and Laura are drinking and one of them divulges a telling detail. It’s the shared levity around dark truths that draws them together. She plays the straight woman to his lugubrious cynic:

‘Well, everything else aside,’ I said, ‘they’re going to struggle to find someone who knows as much as you do.’

‘That is certainly true,’ Putnam said, still frowning at his inbox. When he looked up, he gave me a pitying smile. For my innocence.

‘I love the idea that knowledge counts for anything in that place now,’ he said, ‘or understanding. Or rigour. Or taste.’

To that I gave him my own pitying look.

‘OK, that’s not fair,’ he said. ‘Of course there are still good people there. Brilliant people, God help them. And they’ve been very sweet, really.’

‘No one’s being “sweet”,’ I said, ‘they’re your friends, you maniac.’

One of Riley’s signature tricks is to stack dialogue in this way, sculpting long pauses and meaningful repetitions into something like poetic prosody. The technique also suggests that one is always talking to oneself in the midst of speaking to somebody else:

Never mind carrying a cross, it felt at times as if Putnam had decided to wear a coffin when he came out for a drink. It was as if he were wearing this coffin and daring us all to say something about it. I imagined a coffin propped up near our table and Putnam occasionally bashing open the lid to shout,

‘Don’t mind me!’

‘Don’t mind me in my coffin, will you?’

‘I’m in charge of our little oasis until she gets back,’ he said. ‘Watering, pruning. It’s all in an email.’

‘I have lots of time, now, of course,’ he said.

‘Time will not be a problem,’ he said.

If Putnam’s past is ‘nicer’ than his present, Laura’s is not. Almost fifty pages into The Palm House, we are suddenly plunged backwards into her youth, leaving Putnam and the merry literati behind for 75 pages. It’s a lopsided manoeuvre that isn’t helped by two or three brief interpolations of scenes in the present. The way Riley plays with time (hence Sequence?) can give a reader the bends. Even worse, one may feel catapulted not only into Laura’s past, but into the past of Riley’s work. Her first-person narrators are iterations of the same woman writer, floating between cities and flats, with a colourful dating history and unendurable divorced parents. Reading First Love and My Phantoms in quick succession, I was enervated by the cruelty, so exactingly portrayed, of malicious fathers and pea-brained, self-pitying mothers on whom the narrators avenge themselves.

In My Phantoms, the teenage Bridget and her sister are spending another miserable Saturday with their father when he starts stalking a young woman in a supermarket aisle. He turns to his daughters:

‘What you need to do,’ he said, ‘is look when they’ve been to the toilet. I noticed this when miniskirts were first fashionable. When they’ve been to the toilet they get an imprint of the seat on their legs. You can see it if they’ve been sitting on a wicker chair as well,’ he said, ‘or a garden chair, but when they’ve been to the toilet you can see the shape of the toilet seat! They don’t know it’s there. Can you see, there, back of the legs?’

In First Love, there’s the same father but different kids:

My father made my brother sick in the Kebab House, once: that was a memory. He was sick at the table. It poured out onto his plate with a hot little burp. This was just after I’d turned vegetarian. My father had had to lump that, but my brother following suit?

‘No!’ he’d barked. ‘Lamb! He’s having lamb!’

And nor did he leave it there. As my poor brother chewed his first mouthful, my father glared at him hungrily, excitedly.

‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ he said. ‘You wanted lamb! Wasn’t I right?’

Laura’s father in The Palm House turns out to be equally charming. His brother, Owen, tells his niece:

‘He likes to call other people cruel. But he has his moments, doesn’t he? To put it like that. You’ll know.’

There wasn’t much to say to that. Owen had often been there during those long half-term holidays I’d had to spend with my father. He’d seen what went on. Owen, I remember, had dutifully come and sniffed my armpit while my father held my arm up and said,

‘It’s not just me, is it, that’s a pretty ripe smell?’

‘Her mother used to stink the place out,’ my father said.

Riley’s compulsive return to these humiliating types may give a flavour of autofiction to her novels, especially when you discover that she herself was a child of divorced parents whose mother took her and her brother to live at their grandparents’ house near Liverpool. Laura’s story begins with just such a move. No sooner is her grandmother introduced than Laura flashes forward to her dying and the process of cleaning out her shed, which, like all familial rituals, threatens to annihilate her: ‘I had to wear thick gloves and I had to be careful. Rusty tools meant tetanus.’ This scene rhymes with one in which she helps Putnam clean out his father’s house after his death from pancreatic cancer. ‘It was six weeks since his father’s funeral. We’d spent the last couple of Saturdays down at the house, in Kew. Together we’d filled bin bags with old clothes and towels and bedding.’ Laura goes to her own father’s funeral; she goes with Putnam to scatter his father’s ashes.

The symmetry – what are friends if not the people you turn to for help disposing of rubbish? – gives a kind of plot structure to The Palm House, which threatens to topple into another book: about Laura’s vulgar mother, Laura’s teenage pursuit of a stand-up comic who efficiently makes use of her, her quirky boyfriends, her endless house moves. At one point she leaves a temporary house-share with her things in bin bags, an echo of those earlier bin bags, so it’s a turn towards a happy ending when Laura buys her own flat around the same time that Putnam’s career is resurrected. The old cohort are reunited to save literary culture and drink another day. Putnam and Laura never quite make it to the Palm House at Kew Gardens to visit the ancient cycads, but, in their way, they are the cycads themselves: stiff, rough, unflowering gymnosperms that grow slowly, live a long time and survive in any climate. Riley’s prose, like a greenhouse, is equal parts brittle transparency and wrought-iron strength.