Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

 

- Today this novel was announced as the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for fiction, and deservedly so. It's brilliantly written and powerful. In idiosyncratic and multilayered prose, often clotted but always poetic, Lynch is merciless in plunging us deep into the ugliness of war and social conflict. It demands to be ready slowly. 

- An autocratic, fascist regime, dangerous right-wing nationalists, has gained power in Ireland, and it hasn't taken them long to unleash terror on who and what they perceive as enemies of the state. 

- Eilish and Larry, and their kids Mark, Bailey, Molly, and their baby Ben are the central focus. Larry is the deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, so he's a target. 

- They are a happy family, but the pressure is building on them. The union is planning a protest march of 15,000 people. Larry is concerned and decides it would be safer not to go, but Eilish says the march must proceed. It does but the police violently arrest many, including Larry. 

- 'What she sees before her is an idea of order coming undone, the world slewing into a dark and foreign sea'. This is how societies splinter, and trust eroded. Her father, friends and work colleagues are being ‘visited’ too, and bureaucrats are pressuring her. 

- Her oldest son Mark is called up for national service, as are many young men barely out of school. There are protests on the streets but the police are watching them. Mark joined the protest but is now missing. 

- Schools are closed, as are offices. A curfew is in place. Eilish's house and car are attacked by thugs. The splintering of the community is increasing. Retailers, neighbours, and old friends are taking sides. It's ugly. The government blocks the internet and all foreign media, and electricity is frequently down. The sound of war is there all day and night. Citizens are imprisoned in their home. Food and water are hard to find. The regime insists it is bombing terrorists. 

- The rebel forces are gaining ground, but it's still chaos. Supermarkets are closed, and roadblocks are everywhere. The tension between Eilish and her kids is increasing, which is inevitable. Tragedy confronts them when their house is bombed.

-The way this novel is brought to an end by Lynch is just perfect. It's enormously sad and dispiriting and makes the reader profoundly angry. But is the author offering a glimmer of hope? Given today's awful world, that is debatable.

- A profound and original piece of 'fiction' for our times. 

Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

- Another beautiful little book from the marvellous Irish author Claire Keegan. I so loved Foster and Small Things Like These. This one is smaller, at only 47 pages, yet it too packs a powerful punch.

- Cathal is a young office bound man in a boring admin job. He meets Sabine, a young attractive woman working in an art gallery. After a while he proposes, she accepts, and brings her clothes and furniture to his house.

- But he senses she's an intrusion on his daily routines. He’s upset. ‘Maybe it’s just too much reality’. And as for that engagement ring that cost him 128 euros plus VAT to get it resized for her finger! 'Do you think I'm made of money?' he'd said - and immediately felt the long shadow of his father's language crossing over his life...

- One night she talks to him about misogyny: ‘It’s simply about not giving...to some of you we are just cunts'. She will not tolerate being treated as subservient. She walks, prior to the wedding day.

- It's a simple story. He’s a pathetic inadequate. A little boy who, like his father and brother, calls women ‘cunts’. Once again he just sits in his arm chair, staring at the TV, and that's his life. 

- The End. 

Banana Yoshimoto, The Premonition

 

- Short Japanese novels have become a thing now in the English speaking world. Over the last few years Emi Yagi's Diary of a Void, Mieko Kawakami's two novels All the Lovers in the Night and Heaven, and of course Toshikazu Kawaguchi's bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series have really made their mark.

- Perhaps this is why Banana Yoshimoto's The Premonition, first published in Japan in 1988 has just been re-released in English by Faber. And I thank god for that. This is a Japanese classic, a fascinating, strange, and absorbing story, and exceptionally well translated by Asa Yoneda. And it's only 133 pages long so can be read in one sitting.  

- A young girl, Yayoi, visits her aunt Yukino aged 30, who lives alone in a neglected, untidy house a short train trip from Tokyo. Yukino taught music at a private high school and has become quite an eccentric. 

- Yayoi’s parents are upper middle class. Her dad’s a doctor, her mother a nurse. She loves her younger brother Tetsuo. They’ve just moved back into their renovated house and bought a dog. Tokyo's vibrancy with its trains, stations, bars, restaurants and parks is on show.  

- So that's the setting - sort of normal people leading normal lives. Except, as it turns out, that's far from the case.

- The young girl dreams, and has visions of people that appear in a strange way to be familiar. She is very sensitive to the darkness, the stars, the wind, and the trees, as if nature has messages. 

- One night her brother gets a phone call and leaves the house. Worried, she found him and walked home with him. The next night she herself runs away from home and goes to her aunt's house, where she stays for a long time.

- That's when she learns the truth about all sort of things, which of course I can't disclose. 

- The aunt becomes the central character from that point. …the dark feminine magic that was her nature…she harboured something vast, lost, and familiar, and it was like a siren call to those of us who were missing parts of our childhoods...She had the habit of looking away from things she feared, or found distasteful, or thought might hurt her.

- Also central to the story is Yayoi's and her brother Tetsuo's relationship. 

- A wonderful reflection about how life's vicissitudes whack us however good as humans we are. 

Clementine Ford, I Don’t

 

- I've long been a fan of Clementine Ford. Her two previous books, Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys were just superb. In her new one, I Don't, she delivers once again. Indeed, she surpasses herself. She's passionate, inspirational and very persuasive, a writer of exceptional talent, and thus a real joy to read. 

- Her prose is lively and punchy, and with a delicious comic edge, but what shines through is the depth and detail that supports her argument. 

- Right from the start she serves up a radical proposition that I initially I found shocking. Yes, her target in the book is patriarchy, misogyny and sexism, but are we to condemn ancient wisdom expressed, for example, in the Book of Genesis and the story of Lilith, and the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Darwin? But as she carefully dissects the legacies of these beliefs and their power, and the way marriage evolved as a business arrangement to grow a family's wealth, her arguments become increasingly persuasive. 

- She explores the domestic role of women and its history: the male breadwinner/female homemaker, ‘traditional family values’ mindset - The fantasy men have of their Stone Age selves as ripped dudes tearing the flesh of an animal apart with their bare hands is ludicrous. You’re an accountant Jeff. Are you going to bore the wildebeest to death?

- She references some powerful women from history: poet Emilia Bassano who was a strong influence on Shakespeare; pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft; Olympe de Gouges, an outspoken opponent of the French colonial slave trade who wrote Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen; Emmeline Pankhurst, political activist.

- At the other end there's ‘the human-sized lizard known as Piers Morgan' and the Murdoch ‘hate-filled chorus of lunatics'. 

- Ford leaves nothing untouched. She castigates the whole marriage industry: the cliches of engagements and rings, the boring sameness of banal wedding ceremonies and their dumb speeches, the bridal gown (it must be white) cliches, wives taking their husband’s surname. Why? She asks, is there any real meaning to any of this popular culture, TV sitcom, junk? 

- We seem to respect the legal obligations of marriage, the 'contract', the oversight of the state that provides institutional protection such as child support. But is that necessary any more when de facto partnerships are also included? 

- Towards the end of the book Ford becomes more personal. She becomes angrier, providing a description of abuse on every level, destroying the myth of male protection. ‘And I don’t need or want men to provide for me. What I want is the right to provide for myself’. 

- She describes in excruciating detail the incredibly difficult birth of her son, and the painful ordeal of giving birth in general. The final chapter called ‘Motherfucker' is a searing account of the frequent sexual abuse of young mothers, because men can't wait. 

- My one criticism of the book is Ford's refusal to countenance the existence, which is obvious to all of us who've lived long enough, of marriages that are successful on just about every level. There are good men, sensitive and caring and committed to their partners and children. Their love is genuine and they are loved and treasured in return. 

- However, despite this, Ford has written a powerful book that deserves to be widely read. 

You know, people spit the accusation man hater at me like there aren't five billion fucking reasons why I and any other woman with a brain have no choice but to hate them. But it's not really accurate to say that I'm a man hater. Saying I hate men gives them too much power. What I think I really am is a man seer. I see men in the way we're not supposed to see them, in the endless ways they contradict the myths of their morality and greatness and the ways in which they enforce their hatred of women over and over again. 

I see men for who they are, and I know too many of the secrets they want to keep hidden. It's not why I hate them. It's why they hate me. 

Tracey Lien, All That’s Left Unsaid

 

- This is an extraordinarily good novel by Australian author Tracey Lien. It has just been awarded the 2023 Readings Prize for fiction. It's a superbly wrought immigrant Vietnamese family drama, set in the outer Western suburb of Cabramatta in Sydney. It starts simply, with a slight YA tone, but builds gradually into a rich and complex story of Western/Asian cultural contrasts, mother/daughter tensions, the power of Asian parents and the obligations the children are made to feel. It becomes a very earthy, gritty and real, narrative. 

- Lien has the ability to delve deeply into the lives of each of her characters, as she does for the whole suburb of Cabramatta. They are brought vividly to life. Cabramatta proved that a town could be gorgeous and sick, comforting and dangerous, imperfect but home. 

- Her focus is on a Vietnamese family living in Cabramatta. The parents, who barely speak English, escaped Communist rule in Vietnam after the war and managed to get to Australia. The mother at first seems a nasty piece of work, and she's a superstitious Buddhist adherent. But as is slowly revealed there's a lot more to her than that. Her daughter Ky (pronounced 'Key') is an excellent, top of the class school student, who finds her parents frustrating and unlovable. Her school friend Minnie is a cherished soulmate, a bright spunky delight, and she becomes the key player in the unfolding drama that takes place five years later.  

- The central element in the story is that Denny, Ky's academically brilliant younger brother, has been murdered. Was he caught up in the ugly drug gang warfare in Cabramatta? Ky is desperate to find out. So we're sucked into a personal investigation and ugly details emerge - of relationships, families, abuse and neglect. 

- But there is also love. And a very satisfying resolution.  

- In today's ugly world it's good to be reminded of that. 

Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

 

- This is an extraordinarily good book. It delves deep into AI, its revolutionary promise, but also the huge dangers and challenges it presents to society. 

- Suleyman, an AI expert and founding father, has written a powerful, must read treatise on an invention that will radically change all human lives and communities in the very near future. The book is full of detail and for that reason not an easy read at times, yet it is absolutely enthralling. 

- The first few chapters present a comprehensive historical picture about previous technological revolutions - agricultural, transport, electricity, digitalisation - and how thoroughly our lives, economies and societies changed. Suleyman's premise is that the AI wave will be far more rapid and profound.  

- The back cover blurb says it all:

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.

Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise our lives, operate our businesses and run core government services. We will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability. 

We are not prepared.

Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Driven by overwhelming political and commercial incentives, these tools will help address our global challenges and create vast wealth - but also upheaval on a once unimaginable scale. 

In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces threaten the grand bargain of the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harm arising from unchecked openness on one side, the threat of over-bearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia? 

This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the containment problem' - the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies - as the essential challenge of our age. 

Sebastian Faulks, The Seventh Son

- I really loved Sebastian Faulks's two previous novels Paris Echo and Snow Country. Faulks's gift is to write love stories set in fractious times, and to bring the personal, political and social brilliantly alive. 

- In The Seventh Son, his new novel, he attempts the same portrayal, but unfortunately fails dismally. 

- Talissa is a young post-grad seeking a permanent academic position. She needs money and seizes an opportunity to be a surrogate mother. A clinic owned by a billionaire philanthropist swaps the donor's semen for a manufactured one with genes harnessed from a neanderthal specimen.  

- The baby Seth is born. He grows up a pretty strange kid with some intellectual limitations and some unusual talents. He's a homo sapiens and homo neanderthal hybrid. But as a person he's nothing extraordinary. 

- Faulks is asking whether human limitations can be overcome or are we stuck with them. As his main character in Snow Country reflects We are obsessive. We appear to have bigger brains than other creatures, but we behave in a way that's contrary to our own interests. These harmful passions that drive us mad with love or with the need to slaughter one another. We don't seem very well...evolved. Can we rise to a higher level of humanity, and one without dementia, schizophrenia, depression, and other mental ailments for example? 

- Obviously this is an intriguing premise, but is it realistic, or just a fantasy? At one point a bunch of scientists are debating these issues in very scientific jargon. As ordinary readers we simply don't know whether they are talking real science. What we do know is that Faulks is enjoying the conversation and teasing and challenging us. 

- I was way more attracted to the group of friends caught up in this evolutionary drama. They are loving, affectionate, intelligent, kind and passionate humans, with worthwhile jobs. Humanity’s best. What’s to improve? 

- So I found the main plot line boring and pointless.