This book was outstanding, and I hated it.

I was warned before starting it that it wouldn’t be a happy read, particularly after just having finished Parable of the Sower. But I like a good dystopian novel, and I was intrigued by the premise of Ireland (of all places) descending into a totalitarian state, and I had it on good authority that it was an excellent work (Book Prize-winning and everything).

What I was not prepared for was how much it would affect me against the backdrop of current world events. When masked men are sweeping through American cities and disappearing people from their homes and places of work, and detaining unknown numbers of people in unknown places, and murdering American citizens in the street, and sowing terror everywhere, then it is not particuarly fun to a read a fictional account of the same thing happening in Ireland. And when bombs are raining down on Kiev, destroying the lives of people who, just four years ago, were going about their business like people do in any other European city, going to work, hanging out in cafes, walking their dogs - well, it doesn’t actually take much to imagine the same thing happening in Dublin, and it’s also not a particular fun exercise.

The writing style is idiosyncratic - no real paragraphs, no dialogue markers, quirky use of nouns as verbs (people “sleeve” into their coats quite a lot) - and I never got entirely comfortable with it, but in the second half of the book particularly, it becomes quite propulsive, and I found myself racing through page after page without much punctuation to stop me. But I also read the whole book with my stomach in a knot, and the more I read, the more the knot tightened. I thought Parable of the Sower was a tough read (and it was!), but there is a particular section in this book which just about wrecked me, and I think it’s going to haunt me for some time. I finished the book late at night, turned off my bedside lamp, and lay awake in the dark feeling terrible about everything.

I can’t rate this book, and I can only recommend it with strong caveats. The world is a very dark place right now, and nothing you read here is going to make you feel any better about it.

Further reading…