Irish novelists on St Patrick’s Day

Paul Lynch and Mary Morrissy at the Oxford Literary Festival, on Sunday, March 17

Review by JON LEWIS

THE Oxford Literary Festival programmed two leading Irish novelists on St Patrick’s Day.

In a packed Sheldonian Theatre, the charismatic Irish writer Paul Lynch talked about his 2023 Booker Prizewinning book Prophet Song. The novel is “measuring the temperature changes that are changing so slowly you don’t notice them” in an alternative Ireland governed by a populist political party which is eroding human rights and disappearing citizens who threaten the regime.

The story follows Eilish, who “is just trying to keep the show on the road”, in her job and as a mother, as best she can after her husband was arrested for questionning. Lynch quotes Eilish to describe the threatening environment: “Now is not the time to speak, it’s the time to be silent.”.

She ignores advice to flee abroad, Eilish typifying the “denial” that is a key theme of the book. Lynch is writing about “the sense of alienation, of something missing, beyond the characters, that can’t be measured” and Eilish’s lack of freedom to manoeuvre is paralleled by the novel’s structure where the chapters “provide no space to breathe” by having no paragraph breaks, and no inverted commas for dialogue.

Lynch feels his job as a writer is to “seek questions” rather than answers and “to light a match in the dark” in seeking a truth that “is actually consoling, so you can arm yourself in a sort of way”. He says that “I’m crafting a magic mirror with which you can stare into the face of Medusa”.

Lynch’s compatriot Mary Morrissy chooses a Greek character as the title of her novel Penelope Unbound, which is appropriate considering that Morrissy’s book is an alternative future for James Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle.

She does not marry Joyce, whose great novel Ulysses suggests Odysseus’s journey home to his wife Penelope, reimagined in contemporary Ireland.

Morrissy’s counter narrative for Nora creates a different future for Joyce who becomes an opera singer. Nora becomes Mrs Smith, a rounded person who Morrissy believes can only be seen in her own light if you remove Joyce from her story.

Two very stimulating talks.