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This is serendipity, because I was just going to write something on the recent winner of the Booker Prize. The winner is a novel called "Prophet Song" by an Irish writer, Paul Lynch.
Before I start, I have to say that I am badly out of touch with literary fiction of the past twenty years or so; I stopped reading it around 2005, when John Banville's "The Sea, The Sea" was published. So I don't know what the current trends are, or have been, and this is simply my immediate reaction to a book I have not read, and have no intention of reading, based on the reviews of what it is about.
So! Paul Lynch wishes he was an American. Or in second place, Canadian. Because he has written the male version of "The Handmaid's Tale". Here's the review by the Irish Times and I'll just pick out bits to let you know why I think this.
The main thrust of the story is that Ireland in the near future is now a totalitarian, dystopian state. The good old Irish misery novel redux, sez you? Ah, but in the prime of that novel, the Big Bad was the Catholic Church. Even a sensitive soyboy liberal writer like Lynch can't pretend that the Church has anything like the power it used to have, so he has to settle for politics instead. (And yes, I apologise for using a term like soyboy but that's the reaction his face and quotes evokes in me).
We got secret police and union leaders being disappeared. Wait, is this 80s South America? No, not even that interesting. Canada is the Holy Land place of refuge, just like in "The Handmaid's Tale". To be fair, traditional Irish emigration has also been to Canada amongst other places, but I don't think Lynch is making that kind of connection. It's more the kind of converse you see when people claim in American elections that if X wins, they're fleeing to Canada ahead of the jackbooted fascists that will surely be coming for them.
And here's where it all falls down for me, because the political landscape Lynch is writing about is not Irish, it's the imported American culture war politics, and that's what leads me to believe Lynch secretly wishes he were an American/Canadian living amongst His People, not stuck in this benighted island (the accounts of his previous novels on the Wikipedia page about him are the standard Irish novel tropes, apart from the one imitating Hemingway).
Thing is, we've had our own home-grown Fascist movement, the Blueshirts (in analogy with Mussolini's Brownshirts and Hitler's Blackshirts) and indeed, one of our political parties and one of the parties in the current joint government are the heirs of that movement, Fine Gael. But they're down with all the new liberal social progressivism; indeed, the current leader and Taoiseach is the half-Indian, openly gay, has a boyfriend but is in an open relationship (minor kerfuffle over pictures of him kissing a guy not his boyfriend in a gay club with mostly everyone coming down on the side of ‘not our business’, though here is the video clip about what that socialising entailed) Leo Varadkar, so what would be fascinating in a novel would be the exploration of how the social progressive agenda can fit comfortably alongside pro-business, pro-light touch regulation, pro-capitalism and indeed pro-law and order which is seen as developing into authoritarian and fascist regime.
But that’s not what Lynch gives us.
Instead, he’s writing “Suppose Donald Trump gets elected for a second time?” fiction but set in Ireland. And here’s where I start quoting and laughing.
(1) Article about him winning the award:
Oh gosh wow, yeah, totally risking his career. With a topic that is the received wisdom of the day, the favourite bogeyman of the chattering classes, and the subject of countless opinion pieces in online media, both traditional and social, about the horrible rise of fascism and the death of democracy in Western societies, particularly America. Is he really trying to persuade us that the literary Cheka are going to wreck his career for touching this one?
That bit reminded me of nothing so much as this scene from C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce”, where the liberal bishop claims he ran huge risks and his friend reminds him that all he did was surf the Zeitgeist:
(2) Synopsis from Wikipedia tells us what the story is all about:
Oh, Canada! The dreamed-of paradise for the liberals who are terrified Trump is hiding under the bed! There’s a lot to be discussed here, and I hope to get through it, if I can gather up my scattered thoughts into a bundle (maybe even a fasces?
(3) From the review of the book, which is a little bit critical of Lynch’s approach as a work of writing, not so much the politics:
There are a few points here where I laugh, and the one about the threat of the Teacher’s Union is one of them. Up till about 2008 and the aftermath of the economic crash in Ireland, the teachers’ unions (we have four of them: one for primary school teachers, two for secondary school, and one for university lecturers) were about the most powerful unions in Ireland, able to wring concessions out of successive governments. Whether you were the atheist, Labour Party Minister for Education, the slightly more to the right of centre centrist right wing party Minister or the slightly more to the left of centre centrist right wing party Minister, you could and can be heckled and booed at the union conferences.
I have no doubt that Irish governments would have loved to haul off teachers’ union big-wigs to the secret police headquarters, but they never had the public support until the economic crisis meant that now the government had a mandate to stand up to public sector pay demands and broke the unchallenged power of the teachers’ unions.
The rest of it is standard “oh noes the Trumpists are coming to haul us all off to the concentration camps!” stuff which, unhappily, has percolated over here as well. Now, in the article about Lynch’s interview after winning the award, there is mention of the protests that happened in Dublin, and here’s where it gets a lot more complicated than a simple morality tale of the Bad Far-Right Desecration of Sacred Democratic Norms.
Yes, we’ve seen far-right, white nationalist, and white supremacist groups making incursions into Ireland. Yes, we’ve had our own nativist party trying to get going. And yes, our police force has long wanted more powers and more equipment in line with other, armed, police forces. But all of this has been resisted, in a general, passive, way by the public.
However, and here is where the narrative departs from Lynch’s tale of secret police hauling away trade unionists, it is in response to the anti-immigrant rioting which was destructive and hitherto unknown in Ireland, that the ramping up of police powers happened. In other words, it’s the liberal/left political inclination which is getting the law-and-order police state going, not the right.
That’s where the really interesting novel should happen, but instead even the reviewer drags out the comparison with Trump, and not with historically established leftist authoritarian states.
We’ve had a civil war in Ireland, and the historical parallels with people being killed, arrested, and so on are there to be made. But not in the simplistic manner here.
As to the part where the reviewer purrs about the mot juste, that rattling noise you hear is my eyeballs rotating in their sockets. Well of course the hate graffiti would be misspelled, after all we nice, right thinking people know that the lesser sorts are stupid and illiterate. But they might also like to bear in mind that reports in America of such hate graffiti and similar incidents often turn out to be hoaxes perpetrated by the very people claiming to be the victims in fear of their lives.
The Booker's had a string of weak winners since George Saunders' deserved win for Lincoln in the Bardo. The best of the stack is Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida but read it vs the last South Asian winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
Karunatilaka:
Adiga:
(that thing is "Fuck!/Motherfucker!")
Adiga's a natural, Karunatilaka's a purply tryhard.
2019 was the most transparently political of all the recent transparently political awards. It was a double winner despite the rule against it, Margaret Atwood won (her writing is excellent, but it was for a Handmaiden's Tale sequel) and Bernadine Evaristo became the first black woman to win for Girl, Woman, Other. I'd rate GWO above most of the other recent winners but that's not really praise. The others all do this varying combination of purple prose, idiosyncratic writing, and "unconventional structure." They might not be consciously or even unconsciously trying to be Cormac McCarthy but there's a shitty sameness of what reads as McCarthy wannabe-ism from writers who don't understand the great works succeed in spite of such style because of masters who know when and how to break the rules.
Milkman
Jesus Christ, editor totally MIA.
The Promise
Shit editing again.
Prophet Song
Now Prophet Song, which maybe I should have started with because that's what you wrote about. There are weak Booker winners but the writers still show some skill. Burns and Galgut have chops they just had shitty editors. Prophet Song is the first Booker winner I've read I would call a bad book. I felt less disgust after finishing Hank Green's "I can do it too" YA trash than that shit. Lynch is a shitty writer, this is a particularly shitty piece of his overall shitty submission. I've read significantly better from anons on /lit/ and if someone posted this to a /wg/ thread they would have been mocked relentlessly for being so far up their own ass without even having something good to show for it. The book is poorly conceived, poorly written, and that's besides the terrible structure that should have magnified the shittiness to everyone judging but for some reason put it on track for the preeminent English literary award.
Coetzee's Booker-winning Life & Times of Michael K is unconventional structure, no chapters but three sections, set in South Africa during a civil war the novel implies the whites are losing. The book is rich with commentary, but being Coetzee who can actually write, it's usually subtle and beautifully so. There's an idea in this space; still set in Ireland, a revisiting of the Troubles where the racial line is Irish and not. A story of a person who keeps experiencing events and actions against them beyond their control. Proper punctuation and structure but like Coetzee with very long sections instead of chapters. But all of this would require an intelligence and thoughtfulness and above all skill in prose Lynch does not possess.
A woman won the second Booker, a Trinidad-born Indian Brit the third. This stuff is such a bummer, and it's also insulting because writing might be the purest meritocracy. If someone could write like Rushdie they could look like anything, be anything, believe anything, and they'd succeed, because his lower peers have for decades. Wherever there is a "lack of representation" it's because there's a lack of skill. You can take the angle of social and economic factors keeping that writing skill from being developed, but that's the only angle there is. If it's good enough, people will read it. Political awardings do nothing, they aren't incentivizing anyone to pick up the pen who wouldn't so they're not bringing anything new and good into the field, they're just making the brand worse and the field worse as they further encourage publishers to keep facilitating this bullshit.
Your excerpt from Lynch's novel is exactly what I imagined 🤦♀️ "Ochone, Eileen achusla, but isn't it the hard, dreary life you have and you trying to rear your seventeen ragged-arse children while your drunken husband is never home except to beat you and get you pregnant again in between spending the rent money in the pub, och ochone agus ullagón o!" Such a staple of the Irish novel as to become a parody of itself, and he's still using an updated version of it.
Trade union husband finding out that it's the left-wing element* he's served all his life turning Ireland into the authoritarian police state, but one where anyone can get gay married and sure don't we have abortion now (albeit it's in a limited way) and do you want to bring back the bad old days when the Church was in power, do you, Larry? while his middle class striving to be upper-middle class STEM professional wife working for one of the American pharma multinationals with a base here dreams of making it to the head office in California because that's where the action is, everyone knows that the real career advancement and power lies in America if you can get there and doesn't want to know anything about it, don't rock the boat Larry, we're never going to get a visa if you have a criminal record; everyone is happy with the new prosperous Ireland - if you are in the right place to avail of that prosperity - and of course we need to crack down on the ignorant lower class that is rioting in the streets - now that's a novel that would threaten his career.
But that's not a novel he's ever going to write.
*Or the version of it we have now; the Frank Cluskey type in the Labour Party is long gone and replaced by the champagne socialist element much more comfortable with social progressivism rather than the class struggle, and appealing to win the middle-class vote by promising more social liberal policies while the real working-class element is scooped up by Sinn Féin and the tiny splinter Marxist parties, such as our very own college-graduate Trotskyists.
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sobrave.jpeg Reminds me of John Boyega saying that he expected his acting career to be over as a consequence of his heroic decision to speak at a - Black Lives Matter protest, in London. Okay buddy.
I heard about the central stylistic gimmick of this novel (the entire book is told in one unbroken paragraph) before I heard about the premise, and based on that alone I knew I'd never read it. I've read some books which experimented with the form and presentation of the text in interesting ways (e.g. House of Leaves), but I find it impossible to imagine any way in which this gimmick would be anything other than an annoyance. Upon hearing the premise I'm even less inclined to read it than previously.
You're entirely right to point out that concerns about a far-right authoritarian takeover of Ireland are about as unfounded as it being taken over by pixies and unicorns. Even the idea that such a scenario is implausible in Ireland, but would be plausible in the US or Canada, is fanciful - just as in Ireland, it's the parties who present themselves as woke centrist neoliberals who pose the greatest threat of initiating democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. As @KulakRevolt will remind us, it wasn't a far-right Canadian prime minister who froze the bank accounts of anyone even tangentially connected to an oppositional political movement (the kind of thing we'd expect from Erdoğan or Putin) - it was Justin Trudeau, Mr. "Because it's 2015" himself, on whom Leo Varadkar unabashedly models himself.
To be slightly more charitable to Lynch, I wonder if he's fallen victim to some kind of The Last Psychiatrist-esque "telling yourself one story as a protection against what's really bothering you" psychological defense mechanism.
Any remotely politically aware person living in Ireland in the last five years would have good cause to be concerned about Ireland falling victim to democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. The lockdowns instated in response to Covid-19 represented an unprecedented seizing of control by the state and an incursion into the private lives of Irish citizens, and were some of the longest in the world. Likewise, nobody ever expected the introduction of vaccine passes to get into bars and restaurants: the denizens of /r/ireland scoffed at me when I said I was worried about them being brought in, and assured me they never would - then they did, and the same people scoffed at me for being concerned about this unprecedented invasion of privacy. Earlier this year, a piece of "hate speech" legislation (which, among other things, would make it an offense punishable with jail time to have a racist meme stored on your phone, even if it was sent to you by your annoying uncle in a family WhatsApp group chat) passed in the lower house of parliament, despite only 27% of the public supporting it. It has not yet passed the upper house, but of course the architects of the bill are using last month's race riot as a pretext for pushing for it to be passed (even though it would have done nothing to prevent the riot). All of these policies or pieces of legislation were introduced by a coalition government which presents itself as woke, centrist and neoliberal. Meanwhile, the far-right politicians in the country are so marginalised that they might as well not exist for how involved they are in the democratic process - no politician who could be characterised as far-right under even the most generous interpretation of that term has ever held public office.
Now, you can scoff and roll your eyes at anti-lockdowners and accuse them all of being anti-5G nutters who'd step over their own grandmothers' corpses for a pint in a pub with their mates, but on some level, any thinking person must experience some measure of concern about these developments, if only on a subconscious level, no matter how much they might try to deny it. Perhaps Lynch reacted to the political developments of the past five years with the same alarm I felt about Ireland's future. The problem for him is, he can't imagine a world in which a socially progressive government could also be authoritarian. I don't mean the possibility of such a thing coming to pass has occurred to him, but he's dismissed the possibility as too remote to merit serious consideration - I mean that he can no more conceive of such a thing than he can a triangle with four sides. For most educated Irish people, "right-wing" and "authoritarian" go hand-in-hand, and the concept of a "left-wing authoritarian state" is an empty set, a term without a referent. They've never heard of the Holodomor, or the Khmer Rouge - they think of Cuba as "that place with great healthcare" and nothing else. I've even had a Trinity graduate patiently explain to me on Facebook that Josef Stalin was actually far-right, and accused me of doing a disservice to real socialists by inaccurately characterising Stalin as far-left.
So, Lynch notices he's concerned about the possibility of Ireland becoming an authoritarian state in the near future. He can't bring himself to confront the possibility that Fine Gael could ever be the instigators of such a state (how could they? They have their pronouns in their bios on Twitter!). So the only way he can express his concerns in a way that feels psychologically safe for him is by contriving this absurd scenario in which the far-right seizes power and instates all of the policies he's worried about Fine Gael bringing in (presumably along with some token anti-LGBTQIAA2S+ and anti-immigrant legislation, to improve Lynch's plausible deniability). I don't think Lynch is lying to the readers about what his book is about - I think he's lying to himself.
That was the part that made me laugh till my sides hurt: my career is so threatened by writing this book that I... won the freakin' Booker. Such threat! So consequence!
The moves to give the police tasers and greater powers recently all grew out of the liberal response to perceived far-right incursion and hate speech, and that's the kind of "some sort of public crisis permitted the government to go in this authoritarian direction" that would be a better novel to read, but Lynch went the easy way.
Never mind that I'm supposed to believe that a modern Irish woman in a middle-class college-educated STEM job as a molecular biologist is going to have four kids today, but again Lynch is going for the tired old tropes of classic Irish lit. He wants the "ochone, Eileen achushla" tropes of the days when the Church was the Big Bad (so the martyred wife and mother of a large family will-she nill-she with the checked-out/emotionally unavailable/absent husband and father) mixed with the Ripped From The Headlines stuff, and of course the overseas literary prizes are going to eat it up because this kind of "so poetic!" bullshit is what they expect from Irish writers.
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Again, at the risk of engaging in shameless self promotion...
It's pretty poor taste of you to repeatedly bring me up as an example of how awful and racist HBD posters are on here (particularly when I'm none of the above), and then use my comments as a springboard to promote your own stupid hobby horse whenever the mood takes you. Have some respect.
???
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