Author: Nick BryantPublisher: Viking (an imprint of Penguin Books)Reviewer: Stephen Keim
The Forever War owes much of its inspiration to the re-emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican nominated candidate for the 2024 election for the Presidency of the United States. Although published in 2024 and, therefore, strikingly contemporary at the time of my reading of the book and the writing of this review, the book went to press before Bryant and the rest of us became aware that Trump had triumphed in the November election and is to become the 47th President of the United States on 20 January 2025.
Nonetheless, The Forever War is not a book about Trump. The Forever War is intended to place the most recent emergence of Trump in an historical context. The Forever War is about the history of the colonial project that became the United States and the history of that country from its emergence from that project until now.
The intention of The Forever War is to cut away the myths which the United States promulgates about itself; its history; its political and social system; and its virtues and to reveal a much starker and bleaker reality. In the context, so provided, Trump appears less of an anomaly and more of a product of the forces at work in American society for more than 200 years.
Bryant comes to American history and politics, uniquely equipped. He was a BBC correspondent for nearly 30 years. He spent some of that time in Australia. (I managed to have a short conversation with him, sometime in 2007.) One of his five books is The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost its Way. He spent time covering the United States in the 1990s and, again, for a period that included the Trump years. In addition to these journalistic credentials, Bryant did an undergraduate degree in history at Cambridge and then completed a PhD in American politics from Oxford.
To achieve his purpose, Bryant is remorseless in plumbing past and recent history. Each chapter provides a history of the American Republic focussed on a different aspect of myth destruction. So, chapter 1, The Strange Career of American Democracy, describes in detail how the founding fathers of American democracy were not, in fact, proponents of that philosophy but, rather, regarded such a form of government as dangerous and how their great work, the Constitution of the United States of America, was carefully designed to avoid rule by the people from ever taking place. It goes on to describe the long history of legal stratagems and violence used to prevent persons of colour from voting in elections in the United States including the 1946 fatal shooting of US army veteran, Maceo Snipes, and the almost contemporaneous Moore’s Ford lynchings which resulted in the shooting deaths of two Black married couples who, also, had the temerity to vote. The result of Bryant’s historical analysis is that the modern attempts of Republican politicians to make voting more difficult for minority voters, such as requiring state issued photographic ID to vote in elections, and, thereby, to reduce participation seems more a continuation of an ongoing pattern rather than an unprecedented evil.
Chapter 2, From July 4th to January 6th, looks at the history of politically motivated violence in the United States, much of it largely disappeared from public consciousness, which has punctuated the two and a half centuries since the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. Until very recently, the destruction of homes and businesses and the massacre of 300 Black residents in “Black Wall Street”, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 was entirely swept clean from the historical record. As with the history of attempts to restrict the right to vote, the widespread use of violence to gain social and political ends over time places the attack on the Capitol of 6 January 2021 in a perspective which makes it appear to be more part of a continuing pattern than an aberration.
Chapter 3, The Demagogic Style in American Politics, and chapter 4, American Authoritarianism, draw similar lessons as to continuity rather than novelty and, for obvious reasons, have particular applicability to Trump, himself.
Two chapters, chapter 7, In guns we trust, and chapter 8, Roe, Wade and the Supremes, stress discontinuity rather than the sense of a continuing pattern. Between them, they provide a wonderful guide to anyone interested in a short but enlightening history of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
Chapter 7, which documents the destructive effect on life in America of unrestricted gun laws, also documents a history in which politics transformed the meaning of the Second Amendment from a provision to protect the original states’ ability to maintain civilian militias into a guarantee of entirely unrestricted private gun ownership.
The twenty-seven words of the Amendment appear to make its original intended meaning very clear: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” As Bryant documents, that was, for most of the nation’s history, uncontroversial, and sensible gun ownership restriction laws were supported on a bi-partisan basis. As he also documents, myth making by the gun manufacturing industry and political intervention by the National Rifle Association changed all that. Bryant points out that the wildness of the Wild West was vastly overstated, first, by encouraging the publication of dime novels and, latterly, by the production of movie westerns all of which created the impression of a west that was, at best, exaggerated and, in reality, in the most part, fictional.
Chapter 8’s discussion of the Supreme Court highlights that the original intention of the framers of the Constitution for the Court was that it be neither powerful nor important in the exercise of government. While Marbury v Maddison changed the power ratios by creating the principle of judicial review, the membership of the Court was not a subject of significant partisan disputation until the last half century.
Another singular lesson is that, when Roe v Wade was decided, abortion was opposed by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church but was not a cause celebre for either the Protestant Churches or the right wing of American politics. That has all changed, of course, and the cause of overthrowing Roe v Wade became the cause of stacking the Supreme Court with right wing ideologues. Both objectives have been achieved to the detriment of the American populace which, despite Republican success at all levels of government, still supports ready access to abortion by a healthy majority.
Bryant’s thesis is that America has always been at war with itself. That led to a civil war in the early 1860s which left a peace in which slavery was abolished but the race question was never resolved in a way that established consensus. The antipathy against black Americans and other minorities has continued to be expressed through violence and legal restrictions and created division at all levels of politics. Other issues, the distribution of political power; immigration; sexual identity; and reproduction have all attracted the creation of insoluble division and the resort to violence. America is and has been, forever, in unending conflict with itself.
Bryant’s closing chapters are vaguely but not deeply optimistic. He sees no end to the continuation of deepening partisanship and ongoing loss of respect between those arranged against one another in political struggle. However, he thinks regular resort to a hot war of political violence, in the near term, is unlikely. His epilogue mourns, in gentle tones, his own falling out of love with America.
The Forever War is an extremely readable piece of historical writing in which the reader is provided with a historical context denied them by almost any other medium which deals with contemporary political events. As events unfold from 20 January 2025, it will provide a touchstone to which one can return, again and again.
The Forever War is, nonetheless, a history of the United States from an American point of view. There is some discussion of opposition to America becoming an imperial power at the time that the royal government was overthrown in Hawaii with American government involvement in 1893. In the decade that followed, there was some controversy about the extent to which the United States should go to war with Spain and, in victory, take control of former Spanish possessions. It was, at the same time, that Hawaii was annexed. But The Forever War does not deal in any depth with the impact of America’s repeated interventions overthrowing governments throughout the world including regularly acting to remove democratically elected governments.
This is not surprising. Perhaps, this is because, with rare exceptions when the cost of imperial action has become too much, such as when the Vietnam War dragged on and on, such actions have not created the kind of internal bitterness and division raised by a Black person voting or a woman having an abortion.
Author: Caleb Azumah NelsonPublisher: Black Cat New York, an imprint of Grove PressReviewer: Stephen Keim
Open Water is Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel. It is little more than a novella running to just 164 pages.
Among the review extracts set out at the front of the book, one from Yaa Gyasi describes Open Water as “tender poetry”. The description is not wholly wrong as Azumah Nelson’s prose is lyrical and his repetition of passages to make a point or to reinforce a mood is an effective poetical device.
Open Water is written in the second person in which the omniscient narrator addresses the chief (male) protagonist as the narrator relates the events of the novel. The fourth paragraph of the prologue (which relates events some months into the action) commences as follows: “You lost her gaze for a moment and your breath quickened, as when a dropped call across a distance gains unexpected gravity”.
The purpose of second person narration is partially revealed by the end of Open Water by which time it appears that the contents of the novel are really a long explanation taking Open Water into the realm of epistolary fiction. The long explanation has become a necessity for a relationship where, as in the words of George Benson’s This Masquerade, the parties had tried to talk it over but the words had got in the way.
More correctly in the case of the male protagonist, he could not find the words even to attempt to communicate the reasons why he could not communicate what his difficulties were.
Open Water is the story of a love affair, an intense but slow moving affair where the parties were convinced they were best friends before they were convinced that they could become lovers.
But Open Water is also about being a young black person growing up in Britain. The male protagonist suffers from a form of stress illness associated with having witnessed and experienced police humiliation and violence directed at black men on a regular basis. He has also witnessed black men perpetrating violence upon other black men almost as a symptom of the pressure within which their lives are led. On a daily basis, he feels unsure, upon leaving home, about whether he will return. The impact is not only upon black men for mothers and sisters share the same uncertainty not knowing whether the farewell hug will be the last they share with their brother or their son.
Open Water, then, is about safe and unsafe places. Safety is not only about physical safety. It is about being seen and not seen. When a police officer, even on the streets of Dublin and not London, looks in your direction, as a black man, you know he does not see you but only sees an empty vessel, a stereotype of a black man devoid of everything you are as a unique human being. And when you are yelled at and made to lie on the ground at gun point and weight is put on your body and you are ordered to empty your pockets, even when you are allowed to go on your way and the police half apologise and say that they are only doing their duty, you know you have not been seen and that the pain of this most recent trauma will not go away,
Both protagonists are British Ghanaian. He is a photographer who writes a little. She is a dancer. While Open Water is fiction, many of the incidental details reflect the course of Nelson’s life. Like the protagonist, he won a scholarship to go to a private, mainly white private school. Like the protagonist, he is a writer and a photographer. Like the protagonist, he is musically talented. And, like the protagonist, he has lost grandparents who played important roles in his life.
Open Water discusses music, photography, art and writing. Among the artists important to the protagonist are novelist, Zadie Smith and rapper, Kendrick Lamar. Each genre provides moments of freedom for the protagonist. In this way, Open Water is a tribute by Nelson on behalf of his generation to the generations of artists that preceded his. In this particular way, Open Water paints a beautiful and intimate picture of having recently grown up in London.
The open water of Open Water is about taking a risk and finding out whether one will be able to swim or not. When the female protagonist confesses her love, she is heading into open water. In a world where one is often looked at but not seen; where one struggles even to feel able to breathe, open water requires courage.
Will the protagonists find safety in their love? Will they be able to communicate sufficiently that will feel able to breath? Will they each be seen?
Author: Richard GloverPublisher: ABC BooksReviewer: Stephen Keim
Richard Glover has been in the humour and entertainment business for a very long time. He has written a weekly humour column for the Sydney Morning Herald since 1985. Since January 1996, he has presented the 3.30-6.30 pm drive segment on 702 ABC Sydney. This role came to an end in November 2024, after just short of 29 years. He has published 15 books prior to Best Wishes.
The roles of humour columnist and radio presenter include making observations about various curious things about the way we live in society and presenting them in a way that informs and entertains and, in the best case, brings a smile to people’s faces.
Over a career that, in the case of the weekly column, spans nearly 40 years, the adept practitioner of this art collects a heap of material. Much of that material deserves a better fate than lying unappreciated in the dead (albeit digital) files of a newspaper or the even deader audio files of a radio station. It is not easy, however, for a columnist, radio presenter or even an author to design a greatest hits version of their work that will capture the imagination of the reading public.
In order to solve that problem, Glover and his publishers have come up with a most wonderful idea. Best Wishes is the working out of a very clever conceit, namely, that Glover would publish a book of his own very personal wishes about life, the world and everything. The number of wishes settled upon was 365, one for every day of the year. Each wish, some serious, most wistful and all insightful, presents some aspect of life and society which, if changed in accordance with the wish, Glover feels would make the world a slightly more enjoyable and better place.
In this way, Glover provides himself with a framework within which he can deliver any piece of observational writing provided the piece is able to be framed as discussing a desire to change the world. Since the best and most enjoyable writing involves a criticism of some person or thing, including, in some cases, the author, himself, this is not a high bar to be met.
Best Wishes, then, is a collection of 365 essays by Glover on the state of life and the world. Some essays consist of no more than a sentence. Others extend to a few pages. Some of the material is, as Glover states in the Acknowledgements, material that has been published before. Much of it, one suspects, is totally new. And all of it has, no doubt, has been carefully reworked to suit the format in which it now appears.
Glover, as is revealed in his 2015 autobiographical book, Flesh Wounds, had an extraordinary childhood. Both his parents, fulsomely, neglected him. He surprised himself that he managed to achieve what has clearly been a successful and satisfying life. In Best Wishes, that sense of gratitude for the small but important happinesses comes through with many of the essays stressing the extraordinary joy that comes alongside the undeniable challenges associated with life in a family.
The 365 wishes are organised into 31 short chapters making a book that comes in at a little under 300 pages. The title of the first chapter, A fairer go, indicates two aspects of Glover’s approach to prescribing a better world. Best Wishes is not a political book but, to the extent that political positions are touched upon, Glover is a moderate progressive, perhaps, in a language that was common place in Australian political discussion, he is a moderate “wet”. The first wish is that rich people would pay more tax. It introduces a one page essay in which Glover argues that an effective tax at a very moderate rate on the world’s richest people would make a huge difference to society.
A fairer go also reflects a repeated theme in Best Wishes to the effect that the world would be much better if we were just much nicer to people, accepting differences of opinion as not being the end of the world, accepting people’s undoubted faults but not letting those faults prevent us from recognising the same people’s strengths and virtues. His tenth wish in A fairer go defends young people who continue to live at home arguing that this practice is not only justified by economic forces outside young people’s control and, in any event, has been and remains the practice in most of the world’s societies. The final point is that families get benefits from being able to enjoy one another’s company.
As a comedic writer, Glover appreciates comedic writing. He has been a fan, from a young age, of PG Wodehouse’s works and cites examples of it. He argues that humorous writing has been not given its due in critical discussions of literature. Glover even argues that Marcel Proust has been undervalued because he has only ever been treated as a serious writer. Glover’s retelling of various plotlines from Proust’s work makes a compelling case that Proust was, indeed, a master of chaotic relationship slapstick comedy.
Glover, himself, is a very funny writer. The chapter called A painless pair of shorts lampoons the fashion industry for its various failings including its inability to ever stock clothes of the kind sought by the shopper. The popular sizes sell out, year after year, with the unwanted sizes always being in good supply even until attempts are made to dispose of them by granting huge discounts at sale time. Another failing is the inability of the fashion industry to sell warm clothes in winter and summer clothes in summer. The shopper, stupidly, is always three months late to buy the clothes they actually need to wear now.
A reviving beverage calls out those who go on and on about coffee; the general under appreciation of the virtues of tea; and the changing fashions in the appreciation of wine including the language used to explain and justify those changes.
Best Wishes is very much a book by a person born in 1958. Glover parodies himself and younger generations by lamenting how his favourite stock phrases are no longer understood by twenty-somethings. His examples of young people not understanding phrases such as “we will leave that to Ron” meaning “later on” is related through a very funny anecdote which builds to mythical proportions as misunderstandings are piled higher and higher.
Best Wishes provides the writer with a sense of completeness. Each chapter nicely mixes serious critiques of society with comments on life that may be fairly described as frivolous. His discussions also range through topics that are personal, that provide insights on family life, that deal with the perspective of the consumer across many different aspects of daily life and those of high social and political importance.
As examples of the last of those, chapters include A less avaricious corporate Australia; A politics that is not broken; Media with higher standards; A world that loves the arts; and An ethical church.
Chapter 17: An ethical church consists of one wish. The whole chapter, consisting of four lines, including the title, is all in bold. The wish reads as follows: 198: I wish church readers would treat the victims of their institutions with the fierce protective zeal they have so far reserved for the institutions themselves.
In this way, Glover makes a very serious point about a set of institutions that have continued to fail society in important ways. He also illustrates, in action, his point about literature not being something in which serious writing has sway and comedic writing is some form of second cousin. Best Wishes illustrates that writing that entertains and makes us smile is not non-serious. Indeed, comedy is frequently the most effective way of confronting the issues with which society must deal in order to pursue the Good.
Author: Robert PeckhamPublisher: Profile BooksReviewer: Stephen Keim
A glance at the Acknowledgments section of Fear emphasises that a book on the sociological importance of the emotion of fear has been a project in the mind of Robert Peckham for some time. A working interest in anti-Stalinist Russian literature around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union hints at an interest in fear in the service of totalitarianism.
In the Preface to Fear, Peckham tells of an incident in his life that occurred, much earlier, in 1988 when, as a backpacker attending a funeral in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, of a famous world figure, Bacha Khan, Peckham had found himself in a huge crowd which had, suddenly and unexpectedly, found itself in the middle of an armed attack with explosions occurring all around. His own fear in those circumstances had been a matter of much contemplation during the ensuing years.
Peckham’s brother, Alexander, to whom the book is also dedicated, was an environmentalist and organic cider maker. Alexander died of a malignant brain tumour and Peckham wrote his obituary published in the Guardian in May 2022. In the wake, thereof, Peckham would be forgiven for experiencing the fear associated with the mere vicissitudes of life.
Peckham was testing ideas at workshops discussing Anxieties, Fear and Panic as early as 2012 and, at that time, wrote shorter works on the subject of fear as part of a contribution to volumes of essays on related subjects.
Both in the Preface and the Acknowledgments, Peckham reveals his own thoughts on geo-political matters when he claims the works of his students and friends in engaging in democratic protests in Hong Kong as a source of inspiration for him, forever. In retrospect, I have some difficulty in understanding western government and media praise for those significantly disruptive protests when we, ourselves, jail climate change protestors for momentarily blocking road traffic.
Fear is a universal. Peckham recognises this, citing both Darwin and American psychologist, Paul Ekman. It is not surprising that, across the eras, writers have turned their minds to describing the emotion and documenting its effects and uses. Peckham does an admirable job in collecting a great many such descriptions from different writers and different periods of history.
The history of human kind is one of violence and cruelty and the exercise of power. Those who have exercised power have instilled fear in those over whom they have ruled. The extent to which the instillation of fear has been uppermost in the strategies and tactics used by rulers has varied greatly over time although even the most benign form of government will rely upon fear of the law and its operation as a means of persuading those for whom anti-social actions are attractive.
In the chapter called The Great Pestilence, Peckham identifies a series of catastrophic events in fourteenth century western Europe among which plague and pandemic are important not only for the deaths they directly caused but, also, indirectly, for the social and religious upheavals they brought in their wake chief of which was the Reformation and its resultant fracturing of Christendom.
In Theatre of Power, Peckham uses as his example of fear in the service of absolutism and the divine right of kings, the long reign of Louis XIV of France from 1643 to 1715. Monarchies like that of Louis, according to Peckham, expertly claimed ownership of fear and built its management into the heart of their political calculus.
Other historical foci of fear examined by Peckham include the horrors caused by European colonialism; the excesses of the French Revolution; the slave trade; the First World War and the horrors of life in its trenches; financial disaster as experienced in the Great Crash of 1929;[1] and modern totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Fear is brilliantly researched and “the alternative history of the world” traversed in each of the chapters is full of interest.
The history is interesting in its own right whether or not conveyed with an emphasis on the extent to which the events described have given rise to terror or the extent to which the actors in those events have manipulated fear to obtain their objectives including the exercise of power and influence.
By the end, however, the reader might reasonably wonder to what extent the careful tracing of the way in which fears have been experienced over centuries yields lasting lessons about the nature of our human existence.
The emotion of fear is such a universal that, instinctively, we tend to understand it remarkably well from an early age.
[1] I read a brief article, recently, that suggested that the rise of Nazi Germany was not caused by the harsh peace of Versailles (as we were taught) but, rather, by the devastation wreaked upon the German economy by the impact of the Crash. See, for example: https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-role-of-economic-instability/.
Author: Jeff SparrowPublisher: ScribeReviewer: Stephen Keim
Melbourne writer, Jeff Sparrow’s 2021 monograph, Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating (“Crimes”) sorts through well-forgotten histories of marketing and technology to refute the proposition that global heating and other impending environmental catastrophes are the fault of us as opposed to the minority of extremely wealthy people who possess and have access to the vast majority of the world’s resources and exercise inordinate amounts of power and influence.
Most people who care that we are on course to destroy our ability to live safely on this planet are frequently told, by those who are promoting the course to ruin, that global heating is our own fault because we own a car and we buy things at the supermarket that have been produced using fossil fuels. If we fully absorb the message, we find ourselves waiting at a bus stop in the outer suburbs for hours while those who have blamed us drive past us in their latest petrol powered SUV.
The thesis of Crimes is that most of our choices as consumers are pre-ordained for us. We might once have been content to buy most of our products at the corner store or local butcher neither of which continue to exist. We might once have been content to take our own containers to the shop to be refilled but, now, all our goods come with endless wrapping and packaging. As our local stores shut down, we are told by ubiquitous advertising that we love driving to huge shopping centres and that we love walking soulless shopping aisles collecting the goods from the shelf and acting as our own cashiers on the way out. And when we hearken back to the days that we loved shopping local, we are told that all those local shops shut down because we exercised our choice by looking for bargains at Shopping Town Central.
Crimes argues that, from the first adoption of fossil fuels to the ineffectual negotiations on reducing emissions levels, climate change has been driven not by the many but by the few. A tiny coterie has used every weapon at its disposal to coerce or persuade us to accept practices we never wanted. Whether we recycled or rode bikes or switched off unnecessary lights never made any difference. Sparrow quotes Bernie-like figures to the effect that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who comprise the poorest half of the earth’s population. The narratives that we are all guilty and all responsible for global heating are rejected by Crimes. Rather, argues Sparrow, responsibility lies with a set of social and political structures that did not exist in the past and need not exist in the future.
Three of Sparrow’s ventures into history stand out for me. The first involves the origins of the internal combustion engine driven automobile. An interesting sidelight of this narrative is that, as gas guzzlers were being born and becoming popular, they received stiff competition from electric cars. The leading electric car manufacturer experienced a financial collapse and the way was clear for petrol driven vehicles to dominate. This titbit adds a certain contingency to life as we know it, today.
Automobiles, during their emergence were owned by the rich and were unpopular with the many since they were noisy, smelly and dangerous. They disrupted the streets of towns and cities which were then multi-user centres where people walked and gossiped and children played games. All this could be shared, more or less safely, with the horse drawn vehicles that provided transport. Cars, however, were dangerous and killed and injured many people such that laws were promoted restricting the speed of self-driven vehicles for the safety of the populace and the liveability of their neighbourhoods.
This was when the advertising industry, at the behest of the automobile and gasoline industry, showed their creative talents. The concept of the jay walker, familiar to us, today, though we may be unaware of its origins was invented. “Jay” means unsophisticated, in the nature of a country bumpkin, too unsophisticated to appreciate the beauty and the dangers of automobiles. (Surprisingly, to me, it was never some strange geometrical term describing crossing a road in an arc resembling the letter, ”J”.)
Advertising money meant that pedestrians were slandered in every available medium and blamed for their own deaths and injuries at the hands of automobile drivers. And the laws followed, no longer restricting the rights of drivers to drive at dangerous speeds but penalising pedestrians for using the streets as a communal space as had traditionally been their right.
The second historical anecdote also involves the advertising industry earning big money by flooding the airwaves and other media with a new concept aimed at shifting blame from industry to the ordinary citizen. Before the Second World War, consumers and retailers acted on the basis that drink containers were expected to be re-usable. After the war, both manufacturers of drinks and the packaging industry realised that money was to be made by making containers disposable. The only problem was that the accumulation of rubbish on roadsides, in farmlands and public places was so distressing that legislators were turning to laws that imposed an obligation to make containers re-usable, again.
Manufacturing and packaging capital came together to head off the new laws at the pass. More than twenty organisations came together to create a new organisation called “Keep America Beautiful”, thereby, disguising and separating the purveyors of the message (who stood only to make profits) from the message which was designed to blame all of us as individuals for the accumulating rubbish in our public places. Not only did the genius advertisers manage to disguise the profit-making objectives of their paymasters behind the philanthropic concept of keeping the countryside beautiful but they also created the concept of the litter-bug to transfer moral perfidy upon all of those individuals being sold product in disposable containers. No matter that these same litter-bugs had, dutifully and contentedly, retuned the re-usable containers for generations. The laws requiring re-usability disappeared and laws aimed at individuals, the so-called litterbugs, have been the order of the day, ever since.
The tobacco industry’s scurrilous use of advertising to increase its profits at the expense of public health and the subsequent use of advertising and public relations by the fossil fuel industry to green wash its contribution to global heating are the subject of later chapters.
The third piece of historical learning from Crimes dates back to the industrial revolution. It turns out, looking back, that water wheels were as industrially efficient and much less destructive to humans and their environment than steam power derived from burning coal. But the enclosure movement had driven ordinary people off the commons land they had enjoyed for centuries and a desperately poor workforce had accumulated in the cities. So, to utilise and exploit the desperately poor, manufacturing industry turned their collective back on water power and started burning coal. The industrial revolution which resulted was, thereby, much more profitable to the industrial barons; much worse for the environment; and came at a much greater cost to the lives and well-being of ordinary workers.
The theme from each of these examples is that what is made to appear inevitable and unavoidable was, in fact, manipulated into existence by decisions of the few made for their own profits and benefit and at the expense of the many.
Sparrow’s analysis touches upon many subjects.
A particularly interesting chapter concerns the way in which Indigenous societies in Australia and the Americas cared for their environment and existed without making destructive demands upon it. Similar observations are made of the poorer agricultural classes in European countries who preserved the commons on which they depended and led lives that were materially poor but punctuated by feasts and religious celebrations and festivals. Settler colonialism, and, in Europe, itself, enclosure, disrupted these simpler modes of living and not only wrought havoc upon the lives of the poor but also on the environments which had been previously been carefully preserved as the demands of capitalism required exploitation of the land in every possible profitable way.
A later chapter discusses the way in which the national parks movement, while indeed driven by concern at the loss of wilderness areas, was driven by the desire to preserve natural areas for big game hunters. Ironically, areas such as that which became Yellowstone National Park were still being used and looked after by Indigenous Americans living their traditional lifestyles. The “conservationists” could not tolerate this and, so, laws were passed to exclude Indigenous Americans from using their traditional country, now national park, for their traditional purposes.
Crimes is a peeling the scales from one’s eyes experience. Not surprisingly, even very recent history is buried and forgotten because it is not convenient to those who have benefitted from the events involved.
It is important that historians like Sparrow continue to remind us of crimes that we have forgotten and of some that we had never dreamed to have occurred.
Crimes is an interesting and important book, well worth the read.
Author: Matt HaigPublisher: CanongateReviewer: Stephen Keim
Matt Haig is a purveyor of speculative fiction and The Midnight Library (“Library”) is a workof speculative fiction.
Haig was born in 1975. He has written both fiction and non-fiction and works for adults and children. A lot of Haig’s work touches on issues of mental health and this interest is acknowledged to have been inspired by a mental breakdown he, himself, experienced when he was 24 years old. Haig has published nearly 30 books, including eight novels since his first novel in 2004.
Nora Seed is 35 years of age. Conveniently for the book’s thesis, she is absurdly talented. In her mid-teens, she had the potential to compete and be successful in competitive swimming at world championship and Olympic Games levels. As a musician, she was an accomplished, self-taught piano player with an ability to perform in both modern and classical genres. She also wrote songs and performed as a vocalist in an emerging rock band.
Nora was also academically talented with a passion for philosophy including the works of Henry David Thoreau and Aristotle. She had strong humanitarian values and wanted to contribute to preventing climate change from destroying the planet’s ability to support human life.
By the time she was 35, however, at the opening of Library, Nora felt that all of this talent had been wasted; she had let the most important people in her life down; and that she was a waste of a carbon footprint on the earth. She had not even managed to escape the town of Bedford, the county seat of Bedfordshire, a matter most young people in that town might regard as sufficient reason for deep depressive episodes.
And, so, she overdosed.
Rather than running into Lucifer or Saint Peter, Nora finds herself in a Tardis-like library where time is frozen at midnight and the infinite array of shelves contain books all bearing covers of different shades of green. The one other person who shares the library with Nora is her old school librarian, Mrs Elms, who had, during Nora’s schooling, been kind to Nora, especially, in moments of tragedy and grief.
Mrs Elms explains that Nora is in a unique state of inbetweenness, between life and death, akin to a modern-day Schrodinger’s Cat. Each of the infinity of books (apart from a heavy tome documenting each and every regret that Nora had experienced during her life) represents a possible life that Nora might have lived had she made a different decision to the one she had made at a particular point in time.
Better still, Nora can choose any of those books such that, by doing so, Nora can be parachuted into a particular life at a precise moment and find out how her life might have been had she not made the decisions that led to the sorry state that led her to take an excessive and unhealthy number of sedatives but moments before. There are complications from the circumstance that Nora has no memory when she arrives from this alternative life. Her new close friends and partners and even mere workmates and acquaintances think she is a bit odd since she asks about things with which this Nora was intimately acquainted from the days or years before her parachuting in. But, in most of these lives, this is the least of her troubles.
And, so, Nora finds out what would have happened had she not backed out of her wedding just days from that event; what her life would have been like had she not abandoned her father’s dream of her becoming a swimming champion; and what success would have been achieved had she not abandoned the rock band in which her only sibling, Joe, and his best mate, Ravi, and she were the would be stars of the future.
The terms and conditions of this arrangement were pretty favourable to Nora. If she did not like these alternative lives, she could come back to the library and try another one. If she were content, she could stay in that life and live it to the end. There was even a possibility of going back to her own life if she changed her mind and chose to go back.
As in most speculative fiction, the improbable imaginings which make up the plot in Library are justified by reference to scientific theory. Library draws on quantum mechanics and the idea of parallel universes to add internal plausibility to the plot and maintain the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
But Library, properly understood, as with many of Haig’s works, is about psychological not scientific truths. Most of the alternative lives experienced by Nora turn out to be unliveable such that she returns to the library, quick smart. It turned out to be a good decision to back out of her wedding and not such a bad decision to give up competitive swimming or the dream of rock stardom.
This experience could have led to a negative conclusion. If giving up on my most deeply held dream were a blessing, it might just be the case that I was destined for a terrible life no matter what I chose to do. So, giving up on the prospect of happiness is the only sensible choice. But abandoning regrets might have its own positives and its own unexpected consequences.
So, Nora continues to explore her alternative lives. She learns valuable lessons on the way. Eventually, she must apply those learnings and make a definitive choice.
I read Library in two days, a rarity for me. For much of the first half of the book, with a degree of detachment, I admired its clever construction and its fine use of geographical, scientific and philosophical learning. But, as the crisis was reached and the denouement unfolded, my eyelashes were wet and it became difficult to see the words on the page without repeated blinking.
My test of a good novel was met.
Author: Bonnie GarmusPublisher: Penguin Books[1]Reviewer: Stephen Keim
I had read the blurb of Lessons in Chemistry (“Lessons”). The opening pages start in 1961. Elizabeth Zott has already resigned from her research institute and her five year old daughter, Madeline, is attending school. Elizabeth appears to be a single mother. Elizabeth is already hosting Supper at Six, the television show that purports to be about cooking but which, at the same time, delivers to its viewers the eponymous “lessons in chemistry”.
I was a little disappointed. No matter how popular Supper at Six might have been and no matter how brilliant the concept of teaching chemistry and cooking at the same time might be, a novel based on following a TV show from episode to episode was going to be a little boring. I was hoping to hear much more about the lead up that brought Elizabeth Zott and the reader to this point in time.
I need not have worried.
Because, from that point, Lessons sweeps backwards and forward in time. Much of the action dates from around 1954. One version of the start of the narrative is Elizabeth barging into the laboratory of the Hastings Research Institute’s undoubted star chemist, the arrogant Calvin Evans, to requisition beakers unneeded by Evans but essential for Eizabeth’s important but massively under resourced work and laboratory. This incident and a subsequent inconvenient bout of vomiting has unforeseen consequences, including romance.
As a romantic comedy, however, Lessons fails miserably since most of the romance occurs in the early parts of the narrative. And the romance is not without a degree of related tragedy.
Garmus was born in 1957. Lessons is her debut novel. She is, however, a proficient and practised purveyor of words, having been a copy-writer for much of her working life.
Lessons weighs in at 382 pages (without the acknowledgements). Not an extraordinarily long novel. But Lessons is, undoubtedly, a big novel. It contains big characters who will make the unlikely occur. Elizabeth Zott is on the spectrum, fearless, unfiltered and unstoppable. Madeline is created and encouraged in her own unfiltered precocity by Elizabeth. Lessons features a dog mistakenly named 6.30 who, nonetheless, manages a human vocabulary of over 900 words and possesses dog knowledge that far surpasses that minor achievement; a reverend minister who confesses to not believing in God; a scientist nominated on multiple occasions for the Nobel Prize notwithstanding that he lost his parents and then his aunt through tragedy and was then raised in an oppressive Catholic Boys Home in Iowa; a well-meaning and talented but spineless television producer; and more than one sexual predator who, eventually, misjudge and choose the wrong victim. Lessons, also, manages to introduce the sport of rowing to a whole new and previously indifferent audience.
The theme of Lessons is society’s inability to judge and treat women on their merits such that women are never taken seriously and they do not receive the opportunities that men of the same and much less talent and ability do receive, on a daily basis. In Lessons, these events are taking place in the 1950s and 60s but both the novel and Garmus’s own experience indicate that these problems are timeless.
The lessons are, ultimately, neither of chemistry nor cooking. There is an internal lesson to reject the assumptions that society seeks to impose on you as a woman. The external lesson is, notwithstanding the acknowledged difficulties and loading of the dice against you, to resist and to assert your own worth.
Thirty years ago, I read every book by John Irving on which I could lay my hands starting, of course, with The World According to Garp and working my way through The Cider House Rules, Setting Free the Bears, The Hotel New Hampshire and A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Lessons reminds me strongly of Irving’s work. It manages a similarly complexly interwoven plot weaving its way back and forth in time with apparently incidental incidents and references receiving their full significance in the denouement. Lessons introduces the reader to characters who are thought to be both rare and unlikely in real life. We grow to understand and love these unusual people in ways that we might have considered impossible in our own lives. And Lessons, also, as in an Irving novel, through its intriguing plot and its cast of unlikely characters, deals with moral issues of great importance.
For all of these reasons, Lessons is up there with the best of Irving’s works.
Lessons has been adapted to television, starring Brie Larsen, and is available on Apple TV.
I read Lessons in about a day. That is a tribute as much to the engaging nature of the characters as to the allurement of the cleverly unfolding plot.
Lessons comes highly recommended by this reviewer.
[1] Lessons in Chemistry was first published in April 2022 by Doubleday.
Author: Simon ClearyPublisher: UQPReviewer: Stephen Keim
Everything is Water (“Water”) is Simon Cleary’s fourth published book. His earlier three books, The Comfort of Figs, Closer to Stone and The War Artist are novels. Water is non-fiction and documents Cleary’s 27 day journey from, arguably, the source of the Brisbane River to its mouth. Mainly slogging it on foot, broken only by a pleasant and speedy canoe ride, with a boat trip from the city to Moreton Bay at the end, Cleary endured a harrowing month achieving his ambition of exploring the unexpected complexity that lies beneath what is lifelong familiar.
Cleary, whose father was the Cleary of the extremely respected Toowoomba law firm, Cleary and Lee, grew up in Toowoomba; spent lost childhood hours and days playing in the creeks that cascaded eastwards off the escarpment of the Toowoomba Range; and ventured, for various reasons, into neighbouring townships such as Helidon. Each of his novels have drawn upon Cleary’s childhood environs while also venturing far afield including, in the case of Closer to Stone, to the civil war torn Western Sahara.
Water falls into that pattern, involving a journey from a creek just like his childhood play haunts and whose waters form part of the same catchment and, guided by gravity and the fates, empty into the same waters of Moreton Bay. Familiarity is also found in the urban reaches of the river in that Cleary has lived, studied and worked in Brisbane for most of his life since starting university in the eighties.
Water, then, is a travel book. Travel books are a wonderful genre of non-fiction. The problem for the travel writer, however, is that the act of travelling, no matter how exciting the concept and the act of travelling, itself, is difficult to translate, in an interesting way, into three hundred pages or so of printed words.
Eric Hansen’s A Stranger in the Forest involved Hansen’s attempt to be the first person with a European heritage to walk across the mountainous island of Borneo. His journey involved thousands of kilometres on foot and seven months in sunless rainforest. An account of seven months of such struggle has a great capacity to be even less enjoyable to read than the journey, itself. The travel writer must, therefore, find ways to make the endlessly repetitious interesting. Hansen travelled with local Indigenous Penan people as his guides. One way in which Hansen entertained his readers was to tell the story of his shyness in joining his guides in their river shitting practices.
Every morning, the guides would undergo their daily personal hygiene by standing in the river, doing what was required, chatting as they did so. Hansen was torn between respecting his guides’ local custom and his own western shyness in sharing these daily moments. Hansen’s solution was found in gradualism. He started about two hundred metres upstream of his colleagues and, day by day, moved closer so that, eventually, he felt comfortable sharing a chat while he and his colleagues made themselves more comfortable for facing whatever challenges the forthcoming day brought. What reader could not enjoy travel adventure writing when such interesting anecdotes dilute the author’s description of his otherwise unremitting struggle?
Cleary was assisted in making Water fascinating by his misfortune in conducting his journey during the May flood rains which produced the second flood event for 2022. What had been planned as mainly a relatively easy walk on the edge of a relatively narrow running stream with ample dry ground on either side and an easy ability to rock hop from one side to the other to choose the best terrain turned into a logistical nightmare.
Cleary and his walking companions were forced by the rising waters to the high banks of the stream where they found, variously, private property, head high weeds, dense lantana, continuous mud and, on one occasion close to impenetrable scrub as day by day challenges. What might have been the challenge of consistently walking 15-20 kilometres per day in passably good walking conditions gave way to a series of true mystery stories focussed upon whether Cleary would even make it to his planned bivouac location for that day. Sometimes, the mystery involved whether it was even worth setting out, that day, in the light of the barriers presented by the downstream flooding. Some days it was not worth setting out.
One of the most discouraging barriers to progress were the junctions of flooded tributaries with the main stream. In non-flooding conditions, the encounter with a tributary would be solved merely by crossing to the opposite bank. On a number of occasions, Cleary had to backtrack up the river to cross over at the last viable fording place. On other occasions, the only solution was to follow the creek upstream until it narrowed sufficiently to avail of a crossing. On one such occasion, the crossing was successful but not without a real risk of being swept away by the waters through which the walkers waded.
Even life threatening adventures, however, are insufficient, on their own, to maintain the reader’s interest in non-fiction writing. Cleary is aware that a tale of a journey needs more than the journey, itself. Cleary, to which his three novels attest, is a meticulous researcher. Water is as much the story of the Brisbane River and the country through which it flows as it is of Cleary’s journey along its course. Cleary’s research involved many hours in the library. It also involved many hours contacting and communicating with landowners whose properties adjoin the river.
The in-person research produced permission to cross private property. It also created friendships and offers of camping spots and accommodation for the journey. It also yielded folklore and yarns including, notably, a local Brisbane Valley variation on the tales that bushranger, Dan Kelly, survived the fire and escaped to live out his days, quietly, in anonymity and freedom.
The scholarly research finds its way into Water in many different ways. The full title, Everything is Water is taken from Thales of Miletus and recalls a phase in Western philosophy in which answers to the nature of the universe question were being expressed in terms of underlying realities from which all matter was formed. Cleary, also, links his vision and finding of meaning of his river and other great rivers to the inspiration of Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Cleary recognises with specificity the Indigenous owners of the land through which he walks and the river flows as well as recognising the colonial settler pioneers whose labour forged a means of living for the generations who followed them. Cleary notes the dispossession and dispersion of those same Indigenous owners by the colonial settler process and the massacres which were part and parcel of this process although, necessarily, Cleary’s treatment is less detailed than that found in David Marr’s Killing for Country, a text covering much of the same land traversed by Cleary’s journey.
Cleary also manages to relate the connections between John Clements Wickham (whose name is memorialised in a number of Brisbane Streets), Charles Darwin (whose name is memorialised in a northern Australian city) and the Galapagos tortoise who finally lived out its days at Australia Zoo. Wickham and Darwin were shipmates on the Beagle and it was Wickham who, as captain of that famous ship, on a later voyage in September, 1839, named Port Darwin for his former companion. The tortoise featured in a later interaction between the two men when Wickham had retired from the British Navy and had been appointed Police Magistrate of the Moreton Bay District.
As well as the struggles of getting from one spot to another, the many rich gems of the history of the land and people and Cleary’s observations of birds and mammals and plants, Water contains many of Cleary’s thoughts and speculations of the kind that four weeks of physical demands and limited human company are wont to produce. These are flagged early in a short statement by Cleary’s older son, Dominic, one of his early walking companions. Dominic said words to the effect that his father knew stuff and he should not be loath to share it with wider audiences. This was a bit unkind to a father who had already shared three well-researched and beautifully written novels with the wider world but family will always be family.
As if on cue, Cleary shares many of such stuff in Water, putatively, at least, in the form of his thoughts along the journey. What emerges in bits and pieces across the 320 pages is a philosophy of sorts. Cleary expresses wonderment at the workings of nature and the distances of space and time. He ponders the massive changes wrought by natural forces against a background of apparent unchanging fixity. Cleary admires the human capacity to love and be kind while, at the same time, he is saddened by humankind’s capacity for cruelty, rapine, murder and plunder. The despoliation of nature is an equal source of sadness revealed as it is in the evidence observed by Cleary at every point on the journey.
Cleary resists, however, a holier than thou stance of casting blame on others, recognising that many of the drastic changes to the river have been the source of benefits to him and his family as they live their suburban lives.
One lesson of Water is that we need journeys and time to ponder because finding a viable philosophy for life is neither an easy task nor ever a completed project.
Author: Viet Thanh NguyenPublisher: CorsairReviewer: Stephen Keim
The Sympathizer is framed as a confession of a prisoner addressed to the commandant of the prison in which he is detained. The narrator, who is the sympathizer of the title, is never identified by name, even as the sympathizer of the title. The identity of the commandant is one of the great plot twists of the book, indeed, one of the great plot twists in literature.
The circumstances of the narrator – past and present – are revealed by the confession. Indeed, the confession is much criticised by commandant and his assistant, the commissar, for its rambling nature, more like a novel than a confession.
The Sympathizer is a response to American and, more generally, western coverage of the Vietnam war. Vietnamese people are invisible in most such coverage except as objects against which American heroes vaunt their heroism.
Nguyen constructs his first person narrator as the perfect vehicle through which a more nuanced and less monolithic portrayal may be achieved. The opening two sentences of The Sympathizer reads: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps, not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”
At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is a captain in the Vietnamese army. He is assigned to the counter-espionage section of the Republic of Vietnam’s police force. As a result, he is expected to interrogate and torture suspected Viet Cong spies and operatives. He is the trusted aide-de-camp of the general in charge of that section of the police force.
The narrator has a mentor and handler, Claude, who is a CIA officer responsible for assisting the counter-espionage work of the RVN. Claude is a very charming and likeable figure who carries more than a passing resemblance to the eponymous Quiet American of Graham Greene’s novel set two decades earlier in a similar part of Indochina. Claude saw the latent talent of the narrator when the narrator was just nine years old and had mentored him and assisted his education and career development since that time. The education had included time in an American college which the narrator had used well to develop proficiency in understanding American culture and an ability to understand and to communicate with Americans.
It is Claude who carefully taught the narrator and the fellow members of his cohort in the sophisticated techniques of psychological torture used by the CIA and expected of those recruits in their important work. It is Claude who, approvingly, supervises the narrator’s work when he is called to exercise his techniques upon suspects who are fellow Viet Cong. He must, of course, do such work with appropriate skill and intensity so as not to blow the cover of his important placement at the heart of the enemy’s intelligence apparatus.
The narrator is one of a trio of blood brothers who, as teenagers, had cut their respective wrists and merged their actual blood promising eternal loyalty to one another. The other two are Bon and Man. This loyalty and love have been maintained despite Bon’s enthusiastic membership of the RVN military and his love of killing in the interests of his cause. And this loyalty has persisted despite, unbeknownst to Bon, both Man and the narrator being devoted spies for the Viet Cong. Indeed, Man is higher in the organisation and operates as the narrator’s handler receiving his information and directing his spying activities.
The Sympathizer opens in the final days of the surrender of Saigon. The narrator is organising, in liaison with, and receiving assistance from, Claude, the escape of his general and his family and his hangers on in one of the last planes to depart the capital. Both the general and Man make the decision that the narrator should leave on the plane. In consultation with the general, the narrator gets to make most of the decisions as to who will be on that plane and who will miss out. As part of his devotion to Bon, he makes sure there are places for Bon and his wife and child.
The action moves forward to the new life in America with the narrator still acting as the general’s right-hand man, assisting the general and his family with coping with the new life in an unwelcoming country which makes little allowance for the important positions they once held in a country treated as one of America’s most important allies and strategic assets. He is also required to assist with the general’s grandiose plans to re-conquer his former home in a guerilla infiltration across the Laotian border via Thailand. When the general, in his paranoia, decides that one of his former majors may be a spy whom the narrator must arrange to assassinate, Bon’s love of killing is of great assistance to the narrator.
As the action goes forward, the confession also goes back, giving important background to the narrator’s position. The narrator is the product of a liaison between a French Catholic priest and one of his devoted practitioners. These familial origins make the narrator a perpetual outsider, looked down upon by his Vietnamese peers and regarded as Asian by westerners, whether European or American. The Catholic priest father is neither remorseful nor conscious of any fatherly duty and seems to go out of his way to make the narrator’s childhood as poor and unpleasant as possible. The narrator more than hints that his inability to truly belong, or his corresponding ability to belong everywhere, assist him in the double lives he must live as a spy.
The Sympathizer is a satire in which no one is spared, especially not the narrator himself. In the narrator’s case, his love life after the return to America is a source of much humour. In addition, American cruelty and hypocrisy comes through strongly in the actions and personality of Claude. Nor are the Vietnamese supporters of the RVN or the Viet Cong spared criticism.
The Sympathizer, because of its satire and despite the suffering it portrays, is extremely funny. Comparisons with Catch 22 are not misplaced. Craziness and disorder infect every aspect of the action.
In his new life in America, the narrator gets to engage with the maker of a proposed new film on the Vietnam war. Reluctantly at first but, later, with apparent conviction, the filmmaker hires the narrator as a consultant for the making of the film in the Philippines in order to ensure that the Vietnamese people are fairly portrayed in the film. He becomes a wrangler of the actors hired to play Vietnamese characters, and not much more. His presence provides PR cover for the filmmaker’s unaltered intentions to make the most American of American films, projecting the country’s centuries long belief in its manifest destiny as God’s special country.
This setup allows The Sympathizer to satirise United States filmmaking, especially, when it seeks to portray other cultures and, especially, when the subject matter is war. The most obviously likely target of the satire is Apocalypse Now, but the lesson applies equally to most genres, including the western and its portrayal of native Americans.
The Sympathizer is an engaging and enjoyable read. While the comparisons with Catch 22 and The Quiet American should not be pushed too far, the reader’s enjoyment and desire to read just one more chapter, before midnight strikes and the light must definitely be turned off, is no less than with those two classics.
Just as importantly, The Sympathizer does succeed in presenting a nuanced view of the conflict it portrays. Even when satire is most scorching in its treatment of an individual, a movement, an organisation or a culture, empathy is present at the same time and the reader understands what is seeking to be achieved and through what cultural prisms the world is being perceived.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a massive talent. The Sympathizer creates a genre of its own and Nguyen is an active writer continuing to publish new works which are likely to challenge our expectations of what a writer can achieve. The Sympathizer was published in 2015. His treasure trove of subsequent books can be found here.
Author: Paul LynchPublisher: Oneworld PublicationsReviewer: Stephen Keim
Two quotations form the epigraph of Prophet Song. The first is that famous passage from Ecclesiastes: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.
The second is a more obscure passage from Bertolt Brecht:
“In the dark times
will there be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing,
About the dark times.”
One should not judge a novel by its epigraph. One might infer, however, that the passage from Ecclesiastes signals a claim by Lynch that the fictional events that he traverses in Prophet Song are both common place and universal. The Brecht quote, although more obscure, suggests that the need for all forms of art is even greater in societies that are suffering conflict and oppression.
For Lynch, for whom Prophet Song is his fifth novel and whose writing is acclaimed for the poetic and lyrical nature of the prose he produces, the title appears to be a claim both to be providing a song about the dark times and to be satisfying that need for societies that are experiencing such suffering.
It seems inapposite, despite Ireland’s centuries long history of colonial oppression by its neighbouring empire and the sectarian violence that is the enduring legacy of that oppression, that Ireland would be the setting for a country which has elected a populist government and is sliding into a state of merciless authoritarianism. Especially, for Australian readers, so many of whom carry some Irish heritage with them, whether this is reflected in our current family names or not, Ireland seems too fun loving, too compassionate and too down to earth for extremism to flourish sufficiently to seize the reins of government power.
The unlikely nature of Ireland as a setting adds power to the warning that the reader discerns from every page of Prophet Song.
Eilish Stack is a mother of three children, the youngest of whom is little more than a toddler and two of whom are of school age. Her husband, Larry, is a full-time official of the Teachers’ Union. Larry is still at work as the novel opens. As darkness rapidly falls among the cherry trees in the backyard of their Dublin home, Eilish’s evening is disrupted by a knock on the door by two officers of the Garda National Service Bureau, the political wing of the new government’s police force. They are polite and ask for Larry and, in his absence, leave a card for him to contact them.
Things have obviously changed since the recent election of a populist government and the parliament has enacted emergency powers including the ability to suspend protections in the Constitution. Eilish and Larry are stressed by developments (including the invitation to attend for an interview at the Garda offices) but also carry a sense of disbelief that things have progressed as far as the evidence, otherwise, suggests.
Larry’s visit to the Garda reveals to him a file containing a series of outrageous allegations (the contents of which the reader is left to infer). This only increases Larry’s sense of disbelief. “Wait until the general secretary hears about this” is his response.
Larry and Eilish’s discussions centre about a planned strike by teachers and a planned march by the strikers. Eilish flirts with advising caution but, before Larry leaves for work, gives him the go ahead to give the union and the teachers the go-ahead. In the light of future events, Eilish questions her action in giving such advice. One senses that her instincts were for caution but, ultimately, Eilish felt that it was not her place to hold her husband back from following the beliefs that had perfused his whole life’s actions.
Larry disappears and Eilish finds herself possessing a new status among the families of the disappeared.
Prophet Song is one family’s experience of a country’s slide into totalitarianism. Even more so, it is one woman, Eilish’s, experience of such events. She continues to work at her own job outside the family. She continues to look after her family. As time passes, the normal friction associated with children growing up and obtaining their own attitudes and worldview operates in this new everchanging society. Eilish seeks to protect and reassure her children but her sometimes Candide like expressions of optimism that things will get better rather than worse fail to convince, at least, her two older children, Bailey and Molly.
At work, some colleagues sport the badges of the governing party and their influence grows in the running of the organisation. The pressure to come on board or leave increases as well.
An armed resistance emerges. A civil war ensues. Every event impacts upon Eilish and her children. Nothing continues to be heard of Larry’s location or even his continuing existence. This notwithstanding, Eilish continues in her head to discuss the events of the day with and seek advice from her absent husband.
The unremitting darkness of Eilish’s existence is reinforced by the layout of the typesetting. Paragraphs are absent. There are no inverted commas. Everything is observed through Eilish’s experience. Sections of narrative run for pages at a time. A section break occur after those several pages. Each section is like a mini-chapter and the next section commences with a slight break in time or location so that a new narrative commences. The chapters, themselves, do commence, each on a new page, but they carry only numbers.
Despite the bleakness, reinforced in this way by the layout and structure of the novel, the prose that Lynch produces is beautiful and, indeed, lyrical. Prophet Song does feel to the reader like a song notwithstanding that it is, indeed, a song about the dark times.
In an interview with PBS News Hour’s Geoffrey Brown, Lynch references a passage in Prophet Song in which Eilish has the realisation that the end of the world is local. Lynch says that the end of the world is always happening and, sometimes, it comes to our neighbourhood. During and since the writing of Prophet Song, Lynch has had in mind events in Syria, in Ukraine and Russia, and in Palestine.
This truth that the end of the world can find us, wherever we live, even in mundane Ireland and even in our own neighbourhoods, is, perhaps, the prophecy of which Prophet Song is made. “Of arms and the woman”, he sings.
