Paul Lynch

On television we constantly witness the devastation in Gaza and Ukraine: massacres, violence, death, shattered families, populations fleeing in search of any kind of salvation; far from the spotlight, other suffering peoples—Sudan, the Congo, Tigray, the Rohingya, and still others. Distant in space, we can be moved within our homes, as if > happiness lies in the lack of agitation, (...) is something that should not be seen, as though it were a musical note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past , until we have lost our peace of mind and our certainties. Let us imagine that it all unfolds in a country close to us, Ireland, following the seizure of power by a totalitarian regime, determined to suppress freedoms and rights. It begins with a seemingly mundane occurrence: two police officers show up at Eilish's house asking for her husband, and > there is something in the way they look at her, (...) as though seeking to take possession of something inside her, (...) looking out into the darkness, (...) the cherry trees are old and will soon have to be cut down, they may have to come down in the spring. Rapidly, the situation spirals: her husband is arrested and disappears into prison, their eldest son goes off to fight with the rebels and is heard from no more; Eilish attempts to carry on a normal life, an increasingly arduous task as the city becomes a battlefield between government forces and the Resistance. If Eilish had read Serhiy Zhadan's *The Orphanage* (see the review on this site), she would not be surprised by what is happening, just as we might understand why the woman is slow to grasp what > the trees feel in the air and speak their terror through the ground, letting the other trees know the danger that has come, those sounds in the sky like an all-consuming fire chewing wood in its mouth. There is within her > a sense of death that never leaves her , a conflict between a protective instinct toward her children and the urge to let go: she cries out to her son > what is happening is making me sick, (...) I want my old life back. She is forced to realize that there is no returning to the past when her third child also disappears, and she discovers he was taken by the police, tortured, and then murdered. Nothing remains but flight with the two surviving children. > She closes her eyes to see herself carried forward into the darkness, to see herself becoming a passenger of her own life, (...) and sees her children born into a world of devotion and love and sees them damned to a world of terror. And it is not that she has forgotten her husband, and with him the past, > it is that when she thinks of him now so little of him remains, he has become a shadow, an absence where love used to be, or perhaps a little love still remains in a recess of the heart kept under such a heavy burden. The book is presented as a dystopian novel, a genre widespread and hugely successful today. It would, however, be reductive to read it merely through this lens. The author investigates the unraveling of a soul beneath the weight of an incomprehensible devastation. The narrative is like the song of a prophet, > who does not sing of the end of the world (...) but of what is being done to some and not to others, that the world is ending always again and again in one place and not another ; a biblical message of the end of the world, lyrically sung from the vantage point of a fragile human being. Eilish is not the matriarch of John Steinbeck’s *The Grapes of Wrath* (see the review of *The Grapes of Wrath* on this site), who, rock-solid, fights without ever yielding to protect and hold a family together against a cruel fate. Eilish is simply a woman overwhelmed by events larger than herself, who at first denies reality and then resigns herself, bending and struggling day by day. She is an ordinary woman, probably like so many women in Gaza and in all too many devastated lands. At first, the reader is captivated by the writing, by an English so musical that only Irish authors seem capable of writing, for reasons unknown. The words follow one another with singular evocative power; the syntax flows fluidly, elegantly, lyrically, dense with latent and not always transparent meanings, yet profoundly suggestive nonetheless. Then, moving deeper into the narrative, the fragility of the plot comes to the fore; there is no development, everything loops back upon itself; the result is a verbose, frequently repetitive tale, with a progressive flagging of tension—and of attention. Magnificent English, a disappointing story! Why read it? The language is gorgeous, but it must be read in English.