In his article in the November issue of Marketing.ie, John Fanning recommends two books for Christmas, one of which, Prophet Song by Irishman Paul Lynch, has just won the Booker Prize. Given the alarming scenes in Dublin city centre recently, both the book and Fanning’s words about it are timely. Here’s what he wrote (three weeks ago) about Lynch’s novel…
Another wonderful year for Irish fiction with four Irish novelists long-listed for the Booker Prize and two making it to the short-list. A major achievement and one for which our much-maligned governments can take huge credit. Young Irish writers have been supported and encouraged by successive governments over the years and the current Arts Council budget is at an all-time high.
Writers in other countries often express envy at the level of support for Irish artists but it’s money well spent. The more Irish writers become known, the more economic benefits accrue. Ireland’s creative reputation helps attract FDI and it also enhances our attractiveness as a tourist destination. People like to be associated with a vibrant creative culture and it adds value to our exports.
I’ve enjoyed some of the long-listed novels, but the one that really grabbed me actually made it to the short list; Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. It opens with a normal Dublin suburban scene. A busy housewife, Eilish, is trying to balance her job in a science lab with the demands of looking after four kids from toddler to teens. There’s an early evening knock on the door from the police.
An officer asking to speak to her husband, a trade unionist in a teaching body seems harmless enough. He’s at a meeting. The police ask if he could check in with them later, he does, and he says “yeah, yeah”. She delivers the chilling line: “Larry, it wasn’t the Gardai, it was that different police force the new government has set up; the armed one!” And we’re only on page five.
From there to the end of the book, the sense of menace and foreboding is brilliantly ratcheted up, made all the more frightening by the familiarity of the locations in Dublin 6 and beyond as the city descends into chaos; dwindling supplies of food, burnt out cars and increasing resistance.
Casual violence
The unrest emanates from civilians and a stream of casual violence erupts as Eilish tries to recover missing children from over-stretched hospitals and put food on the family table. I’m not going to spoil the ending except to say it will come very quickly because if you’re like me you won’t be able to put this book down until you reach the finish. Then the obvious question…
Could all this ever happen in Ireland?
No, of course not. But hang on a minute, a decade ago would you have predicted that the Brits would do something as daft as voting for Brexit, that a British PM would try and undermine the High Court, that Americans would elect such a preposterous character as Donald Trump, that an armed mob would storm the Capitol or that trench warfare would return to mainland Europe?
I wouldn’t have, but the world is now truly out of joint.
Novels like Prophet Song by helping us to think the unthinkable may go some way to preventing it happen. There has also been a steady flow of non-fiction books this year endeavoring to explain the unthinkable as our world is riven with internal problems and contradictions; political fragmentation, waning democracy, declining living standards and eroding public services.
