Tag Archives: Ireland

Book review

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, 2023

Wow. Prophet Song is the most impactful novel I have read in a very long time. Some critics have compared it to 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, and I think they are right. At one point I found reading it so traumatic (if you have read it you will know immediately what scene I am referring to) that I had to put the book down for 24 hours. It’s extraordinary.

The novel is set in Dublin shortly after the election of a far-right nationalist Government, the National Alliance Party. No specific timescale is given but everything else in the novel is set in the present. The Government introduces emergency powers that are in effect martial law. A new quasi-military police are given far-reaching powers to quash any dissent or opposition, a classic fascist strategy. Events are told through the Slack family. Larry, a teacher and trade unionist, is arrested and held without charge while attending a protest. He quickly becomes one of the disappeared, a non-person whose existence is denied by the state. Human rights lawyers trying to locate the disappeared are themselves threatened and arrested. Larry leaves behind Eilish, his wife; Mark, their sixteen-year old son son; their daughter, Molly; thirteen-year-old Bailey; and baby Ben. Amnesty International says that “Enforced disappearance is a crime under international law and an insidious practice that not only persists as a relic of past conflicts but also still looms large as a contemporary instrument of oppression used by the states across the world as a tool to silence dissent and instill fear.”

Lynch’s brilliance in setting Prophet Song in Ireland begins to pay off. This is not some distant South American banana republic where human rights have only ever tenuously existed – this is a modern European country. But people were disappeared in the states of the former Yugoslavia – Bosnia, Serbia and others – and there is evidence of this happening in the Ukraine as well. Being European is no guarantee of human rights, and if we think of flagrant breaches of human rights as being something that happens elsewhere, we are wrong. But the Irish setting has an even deeper impact that this, because in Northern Ireland people were ‘disappeared‘ in the 1970’s by masked armed men appearing at their doors in the night, taking them away to be shot in the head in some remote countryside, never to be seen again. (For the avoidance of any doubt, of course I understand that Northern Ireland and Ireland are not the same country – but the experience of the Troubles affected people from both sides of the border, and that shared trauma clearly forms a backdrop to Prophet Song). Lynch also seems to be drawing inspiration from the approach taken Margaret Attwood in The Handmaid’s Tale in which everything that happens in the novel has happened in real life elsewhere in the world.

As well as her family, Eilish cares for her father, Simon, who has dementia. Vulnerable people – the very young and the very old in particular, suffer disproportionately in times of unrest. Simon has occasional bouts of lucidity during which he encourages Eilish to take the rest of her family and leave the country, but she stubbornly refuses, despite being warned that “History is a silent record of people who could not leave“. It is not as simple as that – history is also “a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.”

Mark is called up for military service shortly before he turns seventeen. He refuses to support a regime which has captured and possibly killed his father, and goes into hiding. Refusing his mother’s attempts to persuade him to leave the country he joins a rapidly growing force fighting to overturn the regime. At this point Mark fades from the narrative like his father before him. The rebel force make progress and capture parts of Dublin, providing a glimmer of hope, but the fighting intensifies in Eilish’s area, with bombs falling on the houses and streets. Daily life becomes more and more dangerous, with civilian casualties inevitable. The rebel forces are not portrayed as saviours but as equally vicious as the Government forces. Bailey is seriously wounded during a shelling attack. Eilish tries to take him to hospital but it is being bombed and evacuated. She finds another hospital but when she returns the next night to check on him he has also been ‘disappeared’, apparently taken as a suspect rebel soldier despite his age. Finally, in a desperately upsetting and gruesome scene Eilish finds his broken body in the morgue, showing signs of having been tortured before being killed. Initially my instinctive reaction to this traumatising scene was that Lynch had gone too far, that the Government forces would have no reason to torture a young teenager, but a moment’s thought made me realise that such scenes are happening right now across the world, that age is no protection for children in war zones, (the ongoing tragedy in Gaza was brought vividly to mind) they have no special status, and that the idea this could not happen in a Western Europe capital is simply wrong.

Somehow Eilish finds the strength to go on, and she flees with her two remaining children as refugees from the fighting, trying to cross the border into Northern Ireland. This becomes a story of ‘illegal’ immigrants, so stigmatised in the UK and across Europe at the moment. The refugees are exploited by people smugglers and corrupt border crossing guards. Seeing this experience through the eyes of already traumatised people (as of course refugees often are) humanised the refugees in the face of the often heartless headlines we read about ‘economic migrants’ and the rest.

Lynch’s point – that these things could so easily happen to us, as they are already happening to so many people, and we should reject any complacency that ‘it can’t happen here’ – is inescapable. If there were to be any doubt, towards the end of the novel he drives the point home:

“and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore”

Prophet Song is an extraordinary, challenging novel, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It is undeniably a difficult read but an important one, and a very worthy winner of the 2023 Booker Prize.

Gaza

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, 2023

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Book review

Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, 1800

Maria Edgeworth was, in her time, an extremely successful author, and is claimed as an influence on a number of other writers, not least of which is Jane Austen. ‘Castle Rackrent’ is an early work, a short novella with a title suggestive of the gothic, but actually totally devoid of anything mysterious, other-worldly or supernatural. 

Castle Rackrent is the tale of how four generations of Rackrent heirs mismanage and squander their estate. The narrative is told through the family steward, Thady Quirk, who is sometimes cited as an example of an early if not the first unreliable narrator. Thady has only a limited grasp of what is going on most of the time; his one dominant interest is loyalty to his master, whoever that happens to be. The heirs are variously spendthrifts, litigious, gamblers and careless with money, but the end result is always a continuation of the slow decline of the castle and its estate.

There is very little here by way of a plot. Each Rackrent inherits the castle, makes a mess of it is fairly quick time, then expires. As a satire on the land-owning classes of the English aristocracy in Ireland the novel has some limited interest, but it is gentle satire indeed. When the novel was published the UK and Ireland were working to formalise a political union, and Edgeworth clearly illustrates the dangers or weaknesses of English dominance of Ireland, so the satire had some immediate relevance which has long since faded.

The novel is bookended by a preface and conclusion by an anonymous editor, as well as being interspersed with footnotes which provide an ironic commentary on the text. This has a distancing effect – the reader is invited to treat the novel more as a second-hand artefact, a personal memoir rather than as a narrative. Thady himself appears as only an otherwise minor character in the novel, and his voice seems unauthentic – there is little attempt to capture the accent or language of an Irish native. The text has some examples of local dialect but these seem shoe-horned into the text for local ‘colour’ rather than with any authenticity. 

The text also has a breath-taking example of anti-semitism. This is how Thady, admittedly not the most reliable observers, describes his first meeting with his master’s new bride:

I got the first sight of the bride; for when the carriage door opened, just as she had her foot on the steps, I held the flam full in her face to light her, at which she shut her eyes, but I had a full view of the rest of her, and greatly shocked I was, for by that light she was little better than a blackamoor, and seemed crippled; but that was only sitting so long in the chariot…‘Will I have a fire lighted in the state-room to-night?’ was the next question I put to her, but never a word she answered; so I concluded she could not speak a word of English, and was from foreign parts. The short and the long of it was, I couldn’t tell what to make of her; so I left her to herself, and went straight down to the servants’ hall to learn something for certain about her. Sir Kit’s own man was tired, but the groom set him a-talking at last, and we had it all out before ever I closed my eyes that night. The bride might well be a great fortune—she was a JEWISH by all accounts, who are famous for their great riches. I had never seen any of that tribe or nation before, and could only gather that she spoke a strange kind of English of her own, that she could not abide pork or sausages, and went neither to church or mass. Mercy upon his honour’s poor soul, thought I; what will become of him and his, and all of us, with his heretic blackamoor at the head of the Castle Rackrent estate? I never slept a wink all night for thinking of it; but before the servants I put my pipe in my mouth, and kept my mind to myself, for I had a great regard for the family; and after this, when strange gentlemen’s servants came to the house, and would begin to talk about the bride, I took care to put the best foot foremost, and passed her for a nabob in the kitchen, which accounted for her dark complexion and everything.

This bride then refuses to surrender her family jewels to her husband, so he proceeds to lock her in her room for seven years, until he finally dies in a duel and she is released, to quite understandably fly the country. 

I appreciate this description is Thady’s, not the author’s, and is being presented to the reader as an example of his prejudice and backwardness. The principle intent here seems to present the reader with a comedic situation rather than satirise or comment on attitudes towards anti-semitism or indeed the relationships between abusive husbands and their wives. Compare how Anne Bronte compassionately deals with the latter issue a few years later in ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall‘. 

Edgeworth’s novels remain widely in print, and seem to be read if Goodreads reviews are anything to go by. So far I have yet to see the attraction. If you have read any of her other novels that you can recommend please let me know. 

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