A book that shows the rental market for what it is – a literal nightmare
Without even glancing at the blurb, I could tell this was a story about the complex, unsettling sensation of being “at home” without feeling at home. It’s a familiar feeling to many – whether you’ve moved house, emigrated, or simply spent a long time staying in someone else’s space – but it never becomes less alien.
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That’s not to say the book is predictable. I assumed our protagonist, Áine, an Irish emigrant in her mid-20s living in London, would be homesick – pining for spice bags, a properly pulled Guinness, the sea air, the warmth of Irish friendliness. But Áine doesn’t yearn for Ireland. Having lived for years with her best friend in the capital, and meeting her boyfriend Elliot along the way, she has no real desire to return. “Home” as Ireland is barely a presence; whatever she’s missing is not tied to geography, or even people. Instead, we quickly learn it’s the new apartment she moves into that unsettles her.
The rental crisis, which seems to be expanding to pretty much every inch of the globe, has exasperated that feeling of not being at home when you are physically at the place you’re paying thousands a month for the pleasure of calling home, and hoping your heart lodges itself in there eventually. It interrogates the idea of what a home is, what a space needs to become home. From the moment Áine first steps into the apartment she rents with Elliot, we’re never quite sure if her descriptions of the space, often long and disturbing, and perhaps worst of all, wet, are hyperbole or not. What we do know from the outset is it is very real to her, and that’s all that really matters.
A haunted space, a haunted mind
What Lanigan captures so well, so remarkably is the fundamental importance of a space to call home. This is hardly a new concept; Virginia Woolf wrote a whole book on having A Room Of One’s Own. But in the last 20 years, it’s become something almost impossible to achieve. Lanigan explores this through Áine’s unraveling, both physical and mental. The apartment she’s paying too much for is, to her, haunted – vampiric in its hospitality. It reflects the desperation people feel just to have a roof over their heads, no matter if mould creeps through every crevice.
It’s a post-pandemic world, but Áine can’t bear to stay in the flat to avail of the normally coveted work-from-home model. Instead, she spends money she doesn’t have sitting in overpriced cafés, buying overpriced drinks, just to avoid the overpriced apartment she can’t afford.
Áine realises the space isn’t for her, but crucially, never expresses where she would rather be, besides back with her best friend Laura whom she lived with previously, before she bought a houseboat with her partner. That’s the heart of Lanigan’s exploration. There is no “home” but this home, and yet it’s not a home at all. Her childhood house still exists, back in Ireland, but she feels no pull towards it. She’s grown up, ready for the next chapter, eager to choose her own space, as all fully functioning adults earning a wage should be able to do, yet, like so many her age, she is forced to settle for less than anyone should.
Lanigan brilliantly manifests Áine’s turmoil as physical illness. Her asthma worsens in the apartment’s damp, toxic environment, but her declining health is brushed aside – like so many invisible illnesses, especially mental ones. She’s scolded for not seeing a doctor, even though she’s already been prescribed antibiotics repeatedly. No one really seems concerned. And what could they do? There’s no way out. There’s no “going home” from this crisis. There’s only paying rent to a place that metaphorically – and literally – feeds off your very essence. It might sound dramatic – until it happens to you.
Lanigan presents a problem without a solution, familiar to anyone who’s ever dared to want independence. We laugh, cry, and sigh at the novel’s relatable moments, while resignedly accepting its bitter truth: “it is what it is.” For readers in Dublin, the parallels with our own rental crisis are unmistakable, from the frustratingly familiar text exchanges with Áine’s letting agent, Jack, to the dynamic of the couple trying (and failing) to make it work: one an irrepressible optimist, the other a hopeless pessimist.
Final Thoughts
I adored this book. After years of reading statistics and headlines about the housing crisis, it was both refreshing and bleakly cathartic to encounter it through fiction. The novel’s supernatural elements only heighten its distorted reflection of reality – a world where it’s not only acceptable, but expected to spend half your income on rent, and where home ownership feels out of reach unless you’ve inherited wealth or earn six figures.
Lanigan gives deserved weight to the crisis’s victims – often young people, the so-called “snowflake” generation – who are told to simply accept their lot. Yes, every generation faces challenges. But two things can be true: today’s generation is burdened with an untenable economy, while undeniably previous generations also struggled. Why must one hardship justify another? That generational tension subtly echoes in Áine and Elliot’s relationship despite them being the same age: Áine questions why they must settle for the unacceptable, while Elliot clings to forced positivity, determined to “make it work.”
It’s a tale as old as time – if time was the years post the 2008 crash – and while this is a spoiler free review, it’s not hard to see where Áine’s story is going. Still, I implore you to be along for the ride, for the sharp insights, the dry wit, and the simple yet important sense that if you’re struggling in the midst of the cost of living crisis, someone, in fact too many someones, understands what you’re going through.
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