This month’s pick for the Dystopian Novels book club. It’s just been released on paperback after winning the 2023 Booker Prize. It tells the story of a family in the Republic of Ireland living through the rise of a totalitarian government.
The perspective is entirely from the family, and so a lot of details that you would normally get in a book like this are missing. We don’t really know what led to this all happening, we don’t know what’s happening in the government during the plot and when people go missing, we don’t see what’s happening. Throughout much of the novel, the main character is determined to stay in her home to continue looking after her elderly father, and in the hope that the trouble will pass and her family members will return home.
The prose style is interesting in that there are very few paragraph breaks and no speech marks when people are talking. This, along with a very poetic style, I found captivating, and very effectively built a sense of claustrophobia.
I found the whole book heart-wrenching. The main characters had a large amount of depth to them and behaved like real human beings. As the tension ratchets up and they become more confused and disoriented I completely empathised with the irrational things they were doing in the face of madness.
At the end, they are refugees climbing into small boats to cross the Irish Sea. Currently the policy of the UK government is to take the people crossing the English channel in the same way, and send them to Rwanda permanently as a deterrent.