2023 Booker Prize Winner was intense, beautiful and devastating. I wish that I could unread it.

Terrifying.
This book tells what will happen if we allow authoritarianism to become the norm. Eilish Stack is an Irish wife and mother, and the novel begins with her remembering the knocking. The knocking when 2 cops from the new secret police have come to question her husband, a trade unionist. They take him away, as he protests that they can't arrest him for doing his job. She is left to try to protect her family. They try to take her son and she does what she believes is right to protect him. Her young daughter and her baby boy cling to her. Eilish has to make a terrible choice to protect her family.
As you read this, you should think of what is happening in our world, and how this isn't that far from reality if we let democracy fail. ( )

This did some things remarkably well, and others less so.

Most Westerners see the possibility of becoming a refugee, of needing to flee for one's life from brutal despotic rule, as something wholly unconnected from their lives We are wrong. It is, of course, entirely possible. Given the turn toward nationalism in many Western countries in the past several years it even seems probable. I like the book's foundation, a swift rise to totalitarian violence and resulting civil war in the West (here in Ireland.) It is a chilling prospect and raises many important questions. It asks who we are, what we can and/or should do to stop the descent, and what we would do if we found ourselves suddenly in a country we did not recognize that was trying to kill us. The events here are not dystopian fantasy, they are events happening at this very moment in several places. By hewing close to reality but setting it in the West Lynch forces the reader to confront her vulnerability. So far so good.

I also liked Lynch's choice to write this book using blocks of text with dialogue, dream, observation and reportage glommed together to disorient the reader and induce low-key panic. He eschews paragraphs, quotation marks, even the rules of punctuation. (I am clutching my pearls as I type! It is anarchy!) There is some brilliant writing innovation going on. But all throughout this was a book that I admired more than I enjoyed. This feeling of tension created by the writing style, that sense of the walls closing in, of claustrophobia is good craft. However, using it throughout makes the read one note.

For me the bigger problem was that Lynch left out facts necessary to make the story believable. As mentioned I absolutely believe we could wake up to despotic rule (in fact it looks more likely every day) but despots have rules and scripts that whip people into zealotry. Here Lynch tells us nothing about this party that has swept into power. We know they don't like trade unionists and that they demand absolute compliance and loyalty. That is it. I needed more. And the state's actions make no sense. At the start when they come for what they perceive as the union agitator that was plausible, but they they go after his family, including his teenagers, for no reason, Even stranger, they have a chance to get rid of these people they have decided are undesirable, but they deny a passport to the family's infant son so the family can't leave. Why would they want the family to stay? It is incomprehensible. This all could have been set up at the beginning fairly simply but it was not. As a result, I found this hard to really sink into. I found myself thinking "But why??" a good deal of the time. The book could have been much more substantial if it had been set up correctly, instead swaths of it felt like standard libertarian conspiracy theorist the state is gonna getcha propaganda.

I generally like Booker winners, but there are several in recent years that I respected but could not finish (Milkman and A Brief History of Seven Killings come to mind) so I guess there is precedent. Not a bad book, but not an enduring one either IMO. To be worth my time a book must engage my emotions and my intellect in a satisfying way. This did not.) ( )

Couldn't put it down. This isn't a dystopian story, it is happening now. The story showns how world around you deteriorates and there is nothing you can do about it but react. You try and do what is best but it spirals out of your control. I imagine it tells the story of so many people in todays world. Hopefully in encourages some empathy in readers. I wasn’t a fan of the big paragraphs but really enjoyed the story. ( )

What a book with which to begin my reading year. I found it disturbing, terrifying, and impossible to put down. It's set in Ireland in the near future, after a fascist government has been elected to power. The narrative is seen through the eyes of Eilish, biochemist, married to Larry, teacher and senior trade unionist, mother of four children aged one to sixteen, and daughter of Simon, who lives nearby in the early stages of dementia. Larry disappears after a demonstration, as the government tightens its grip on everyday life - boys of 17 will be called up for national service for instance, notwithstanding that they might have, like Eilish's son, designs on university and a future career. As daily life becomes daily more difficult, her elder sister living in Canada tries time and again to persuade her to leave with her family, before it's too late, and offers her the help to do so. Always she refuses. She can't leave Larry, she can't leave Simon... and so on. The prose becomes, like the family's life, increasingly claustrophobic. Long breathless paragraphs, light on punctuation drive the story on as Eilish's decision making and relationship with her children becomes increasingly erratic, as the government increases its stranglehold on everyday life, as violence and the impossibility of everyday living increases. This story brought the reality of life in Syria, in Ukraine, in Palestine frighteningly into focus. The final pages should be required reading for the anti-immigration lobby. A deeply uncomfortable read. ( )