FOR many, the term first love can evoke fond, awkward memories of young romance. But this is not the case in Gwendoline Riley’s latest novel. In fact, the title is a strange choice for a book which unflinchingly explores toxic relationships and, as a result, contains little warmth and few acts of love.

First Love is Riley’s fifth novel. The Londoner’s debut, Cold Water, won the Betty Trask Award in 2002 and from then on Riley has written an admirable set of novels which question the social expectations imposed on women. Her female characters are often intelligent, independent, artistic individuals dealing with a sense of alienation, and the sensitive protagonist in First Love is no exception.

The National:

On the opening page we meet Neve, a successful writer in her mid-30s. She’s married to Edwyn, an older man who suffers from an unnamed debilitating disease. Their relationship is difficult to pin down: sometimes tender, sometimes cringingly abusive. Neve recalls how they held hands and faced each other on their wedding day to say their vows: “I promise to love you and care for you as long as both shall live”. “Potent words,” she reflects in hindsight, though harsher words are uttered when Edwyn calls her “sewer scum” for getting drunk in the flat.

One hopes that their marriage is an exceptional union of the minds, though Edwyn’s continuous verbal abuse dampens that hope. Only Neve’s clinging to him, perhaps due to a lack of options, illustrates that forgiveness is perhaps a greater force than love.

But First Love is not a novel about marriage. Riley’s fictive net is wider than that: the novel centres on Neve’s relationships with her family and how they have failed her in some way. Psychologists have long argued that one’s first love is one’s mother, and this is unfortunate in Neve’s case. Neve’s unnamed mother is a narcissistic pensioner who talks incessantly about her needs. Here Riley’s aptitude for similes reveals itself in the description of the mother’s voice as a “doll’s-tea-party voice: self-enclosed, self-chivvying.” More than once, Neve mentions that her mother “bares her teeth”, an act suggestive of predation, which illustrates an absence of trust and makes these passages uncomfortable reading.

Neve’s late father was no better: a cruel, overweight drunk who labelled all women “filthy” and lived a life of mess and excess; near the end of his life his housekeeper found him ordering meals “from the four corners of the globe.” One can draw parallels between her relationship with her father to her marriage to Edwyn, and perhaps conclude that people fall in love with the familiar.

Thank goodness, then, for Neve’s talents as a writer: mid-novel, she gets a call from “Maureen from Scottish Arts” to say she has won a fellowship to study in France, much like the real-life Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.

In the novel’s form as a series of flashbacks, the narrative moves from one city to another: Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester and London. Scenic paths in the west end of Glasgow are lovingly traced, particularly the long trek up Great Western Road, a left turn on to Byres Road, then down the hill to Partick. Riley joins the cities together by finding similarities in the gritty student pubs, the silences of canals, and the wet cobbled streets. Riley’s style is analytic and spare; perhaps too frugal for some tastes. However, her economical style generally works in her favour, as certain observations stand out from the thin text. Riley shows a sensitivity to the way natural elements shape the day and reflect mood. Light is “unforgiving”, rain on the walls becomes “like a gel”, and flies have a “quick-quick-slow” motion. There are also chunks of text which step outside the narrator’s customary steady tone and add a much-needed sense of urgency: “Can the future be a white expanse? Can you run in, heart pounding?”

The book leaves behind a gloomy atmosphere. One can’t help but feel sympathy for Neve and her broken family: her horrible husband, narcissistic mother and bad memories of her father. Yet one of Riley’s messages in the novel is that the only person you can depend upon in life is yourself. At one point, Neve writes herself a series of instructions, including: “Get on with your work. Don’t pet him. Don’t act like a baby. Don’t be a cat.”

In this beguiling novel, Riley seems to be saying that life is an exercise in falling short.