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Notes -
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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