The 2023 Booker winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is a vastly admirable book, but there is something deeply odd about it: it is a novel about a dystopian coup that takes down Ireland’s ‘liberal democracy’, not about the dystopian coup that was actually happening at the time it was written. By definition, most novels are stories
In February, I spoke at the first ‘Irexit’ public meeting in Dublin, a discussion about options for Ireland in the event of various eventualities arising from Brexit or some more fundamental disintegration of the EU. Nigel Farage was among the speakers, so what might otherwise have been ignored became the focus of finger-wagging by the
I am a rock ‘n’ roller by origin and inclination. I started off in rock journalism writing about bands and song and gigs. I wrote a book vaguely about U2, though not really. I loved the blues, where the whole thing started: the cry of the slave waking up to the theft of his life.
