War at home
I've just finished reading the Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song, a near-future dystopia in which author Paul Lynch imagines Ireland spiralling into an authoritarian fascist state. The novel follows Eilish, who is forced into more and more desperate actions as she struggles to hold her family together amidst the terror of disappearances and violent conflict.
As well as a literary novel, Prophet Song is a genuinely gripping read, and one I stayed up late reading (and stayed up even later thinking about). It feels very real: because it is very real. From Gaza to Ukraine to Syria, ordinary people like Eilish, with their ordinary jobs and ordinary children and ordinary concerns about ordinary aging parents, are living through extraordinary violence and hardship.
Though they're very different pieces of writing, Prophet Song echoed, for me, Jon McGregor's short story, 'Supplementary Notes to the Testimony of Appellants B&E' (in his 2012 collection This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You) which I read a few months ago. McGregor's story transplants the harrowing experiences faced by migrant refugee children as they attempt to flee conflict, to the fenlands of eastern England.
Like Prophet Song, 'Supplementary Notes' situates the impossible decisions of people living through violence in familiar landscapes. Stories like this require those of us living far from war to imagine how we might respond to the impossible choices currently being faced by people around the world. When every new day brings more harrowing true stories, these works of fiction also help us understand that the most awful experiences are still happening to real people, who live whole lives and are more than just the worst thing that ever happened to them.