March is all about St Patrick’s Day for me. My father arrived in Australia as a young boy on this day in 1927. He was a great storyteller but not a writer – more a talker!
For a small country, Ireland produces a lot of Booker Prize winners. Remember Anne Burns’ Milkman, John Banville’s The Sea and Anne Enright’s The Gathering. All different and so too is the 2023 Booker Prize winning Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.
Strap yourself in when reading this one. It imagines the Republic of Ireland slipping into totalitarianism. It’s a dystopian nightmare. It all feels so possible as we watch what’s happening in Palestine, Ukraine and Syria. I kept thinking “what would I do if this were happening here”. While it deals with impossible choices, one of the main characters, Eilish, is grappling with raising her family in a world gone mad and the disappearance of her husband and one of her children. With violence, bloodshed and mayhem everywhere, Eilish is trying to cope with feeding and housing her kids, keeping their clothes clean and putting a positive slant on things. Trying to keep things normal against surrounding horror is unnervingly relatable. The tension is heightened by the lack of paragraph breaks and punctuation until, just like Eilish in her situation, you adapt.
This is a book you will never forget. It deserves multiple readings, and I can’t wait to read it again but not before I’ve read a few less demanding books.
I thought the slim novel Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, might fit the bill. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 but I only picked it up a few months ago knowing nothing about it. Now I see it everywhere and for good reason. It’s superb and, like Prophet Song, it’s disturbing. Actually, it’s more disturbing because it deals with unthinkable things that happened in Ireland not that long ago.
What I love about most Irish writers is that they write beautifully about tough issues and convey a level of humanity and humour that elevates the writing from being potentially depressing to being absorbing, often uplifting and thought provoking.
Where to buy
Shop local: Humphrey’s at Manly, Berkelouw Balgowlah, Harry Hartog Brookvale
Drowning in Bryan Brown
I’m drowning in Bryan Brown – watching him on Boy Swallows Universe (Netflix) and the new series Darby and Joan (ABC – this is Australia’s answer to Midsomer Murders, but better), and reading his books.
He’s a famous Northern Beaches resident with some Irish blood running through his veins and maybe that’s contributed to his newfound success as a writer. I loved Sweet Jimmy, his first book of short stories on crime, and his just-released first full-length book, The Drowning, keeps up the crime theme and demonstrates Brown’s writing chops mirror his knockabout style acting chops. It’s a thriller with more twists and turns than Luna Park’s Big Dipper and the writing is so visual you feel like you’re watching a film as you read it.
Brown’s use of many Australian colloquialisms adds to the appeal. You know what you’re in for from the first sentence, “David ditched his bike by the side of the track behind a gummy.”
Where to buy
Try Bookoccino at Avalon and you might bump into Bryan