I don’t know if you should read Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. I mean you really should because it’s some of the most beautiful writing I’ve read in recent memory. And you should because the dystopian near future (or present depending on where you live) of far right government arbitrary detention and state sponsored murder and denial of rights and limitations on movement and futile attempts to escape matters. And you should because the yearning of a mother to protect her children and maintain their innocence (and life) echoes for days. But goddddd is it depressing. So you know, make your own choices, but this one is really, really good.
Category Archives: Prize Winner
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is lovely. A short – novella? – novel that follows Furlong, the small town coal-delivery man as he discovers truths both of his own past and of the horrors of the Catholic “mother and baby homes.” When Furlong discovers a young woman being held captive in a coal shed the nuns who have kept her there implicitly threaten to deny Furlong’s own daughters access to the Church-run school. Furlong must then decide between preserving the goodwill of the Church for his own family and rescuing – at least one – of these trapped women. Complicating his choice is Furlong’s status as a bastard himself, raised to ‘goodness’ through the mercy of a wealthy woman who allowed his own mother to stay with her despite her ‘fallen’ status.
What, the book asks, should we be willing to give up for a just cause? What personal sacrifice do we owe when institutional harm and state violence is being wreaked upon the innocent? How can we imagine ourselves inherently good or worthy or kind when so much of what we are and what we have owes to chance and circumstance? And so, with the privilege we do hold, what moral obligation do we have to use this privilege well?
For Furlong this is a question pondered by the fire with a decision that he recognizes as implicating those he loves best and. For the reader these are the questions that are not – as historical fiction always reminds us – of the past, but urgently present.
It is an excellent read and one offered on St. Patrick’s day for its very certain setting. Oh and to let you know it was adapted for TV with Cillian Murphy starring, so you know, that’s also a good reason to read it.
Filed under Book Club, Booker Prize, Fiction, Prize Winner
The Talk: Excellent
I hadn’t heard of Darrin Bell before my mum suggested The Talk, but I can’t wait to spend more time with his work. The Talk is Bell’s memoir of growing up in amid racist structures and people and of his path to becoming a Pulitzer winning editorial cartoonist. A Künstlerroman for those collecting their literary terms. I wish I’d had it to recommend in a recent conversation with a white man who told me there were no racist police officers. Or that I was teaching a course that I could put it on the booklist for so that more white young people could hear early: racism is real and white supremacy is not an accident and you have responsibilities for change. And as Bell ends the book, so that more black young people could hear early: you are not alone. Alas, all I have is this humble platform on which to echo mum’s recommendation: go read The Talk!
Oh and if you needed more reason: it’s visually stunning.
Filed under Non-fiction, Prize Winner
Tom Lake: A book to bury your nights
Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake sucked me up and spat me out a few days later. The sort of book you don’t notice you’re reading until hours later and you have turned prune in the tub or the clock is – traitorously – telling you its well past your very last possible bedtime. Which is strange because it’s not a book that’s “about” very much. Which is to say it isn’t very plot-y. It is instead a book about how we become, how events that once shook us fade into memories we can only loosely sketch the contours of later.
On its surface the story is that of Lara and how she was briefly an actor, briefly going to be a very famous actor, briefly the lover of an eventually very famous actor Peter Duke, briefly someone else. A story she is parcelling out for her adult daughters as they work the days of pandemic lockdowns on their (albeit occasionally-overly-pastoral-and-idealized even though it is supposed to be pastoral and idealized) family farm.
There’s a beautiful scene where Lara is explaining to her daughters why she doesn’t regret or question the decision (though it wasn’t really her decision and on every occasion where she’s offered the chance she still chooses Peter?) to leave Peter and be with their father, plainer-than-steady-reliable Joe. She explains it something like Peter is a carnival ride – wild, epic entertainment, but always going to leave you feeling sick and disoriented and so you’re relieved to get away. It’s mostly persuasive. The reader doesn’t question that Lara now – Lara of three grown children and an established farm – doubts anything about Joe. Their relationship reads as perfectly solid and deep (and probably overly pastoral and idealized). And still it’s surprising that this wild ride of Peter Duke can be so thoroughly – seemingly – parcelled as fond memory instead of what he is – a symbol for an alternate life she could have led, another path had only small changes happened or not.
It is, of course, the mirror to the reader – an invitation to cast back across the life to ask where these moments of rupture and decision have been and will be. Deliberate words there – rupture and decision – those moments that change is made for us and those where we (apparently) exercise some direction on what will come next.
So, too, the reader gets to reexamine for themselves the way in which the experience of cataclysmic event – a pandemic – becomes, necessarily, something we remember with distant curiosity: do you remember when we wiped all the cereal boxes with lysol wipes before the came into the house? As if we can forget the terror of uncertainty and interminability that accompanied that particular distorted time for the privileged (me) that experienced it from within my home.
For Lara the remembered story within the lockdown days of the ruptured change of her summer at Tom Lake offers us that promise and threat: it’s all change; none of this will last.
In that theme it is also a book of parenting and death: my favourites. Many scenes of her recollection of her daughters as small children with sticky hands – (let us agree this is an image that has Done Its Time and can be retired, even while yes, many toddlers do have sticky hands) and brutal awareness of their Full Adulthood, the way in which that ‘longest shortest time’ wrenches the parent in the repetition of the call to cherish it, to savour it, to hold on to it – as if we didn’t know, is if we weren’t constantly pressingly impossibly aware of how temporary and tender it is.
And how we will full circle to the graveyard that holds the generations of the family on the farm (but will it if Emily maintains that children shouldn’t be born into a world so fractured? And isn’t she right?) – so sacred in its promise of final redemption that Peter Duke pays untold dollars for the privilege of burial there – and the promise that all of them, all of us, meet there as what can we do but watch on double time the inevitability of the change.
Savour this one then and – certainly, as it was always certain – enjoy the end.
Filed under American literature, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, Prize Winner
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