Prophet Song

Prophet Song is warning become handbook.

Set in Dublin, it tells us how the military phase of a fascist takeover proceeds outwardly, what it feels like to endure. It’s not just the plot, the start of the disappearances (trade union activists first), then the gathering suspicion from neighbours, the eldest son over the border to become a paramilitary, the effect on the younger children, the eventual and inevitable descent into ever worsening situations –

It's the manner of the telling. The vertigo of the loss of fact, certainty, information, stability, control; the dissolution of perspective, the mingling of the outer and inner, the endless nausea of barely suppressed terror.

Mam, I tried his phone. Mark’s phone, the number’s been disconnected. Something has rolled across Eilish’s mouth, she is moving through the room bending to collect the clothes on the floor, she is standing in the bathroom staring at the steaming water, what rises and dissipates, what comes into expression moment by moment yet cannot be known, this feeling always of possibility giving rise to hope. She wants to go into the bedroom and take Molly’s hands and say everything is going to be fine, she remains before the wicker basket and drops the clothes and feels herself falling from her arms, this feeling they are all falling towards something that cannot be defined by anything she has known in her life. (p. 170)

Everybody Knows

 

A terrific mystery set in contemporary L.A., the 5th most self-mythologized Western city of the last thousand years after New York, London, Paris & Rome.

Harper’s plot threads through some of the many ethnic subcultures of the city, but its real focus is the L.A. Police and Sheriff’s departments, their daily deputies’ and plods’ desires and drives. Truth and Justice are a long way down the list... One of its strongest virtues is that it continually evokes Joseph Wambaugh’s LAPD novels of the 1970s.

But it’s fifty years later now, and the situation is fifty years worse.

Everybody Knows shares its title with that cynical, elegant, distantly furious Leonard Cohen song about corruption as an open secret, and it does the subject proud.

A Very Private School: A Memoir

A boy made to lie naked across the Headmaster's knees to be caned, so severely the marks were still visible sixty years later.

That's why I value this book.

When I ws a child it was almost impossible to see beyond the British Empire, or very far into it.

And now it's crystal clear what the pain and blood and labour and poverty and ostracism of millions of people, bought.