25 years after the events of Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey has integrated to American life successfully, but faces a crisis in consequence of her husband's infidelity, a crisis that propels her home to Enniscorthy. Guest Matthew Ryan, a specialist in Modern Literature at the Australian Catholic University with an expertise in Tóibín's work, stresses that Eilis is a more assertive character than we meet in Brooklyn. But can we ever go home? Much has changed. Eilis attempts to revive old relationships, unaware of complications that have arisen in her absence, leading host Chris Murray to wonder whether the migrant character can treat multiple locations as fully real, or always treats one place as a dream. Yet the locals can be selfish too, with characters like the disappointed Jim Farrell and widowed Nancy Sheridan identifying each other as means to their own self-transformation. Small-town Ireland is a place in which characters feel watched, and Tóibín's cast agonises over whether their desires are respectable. For this reason, what is unsaid is vitally important in Tóibín's work, and his characters' paralysis looks back to writers like James Joyce: Chris and Matt ask whether Tóibín indicates an essentially Irish condition.

Contains spoilers.

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Dr Frances Devlin-Glass, Director of the annual James Joyce celebration Bloomsday Melbourne, sees Joyce's Modernism at work in McBride's novel. Chris and Frances find McBride having fun with language, the written sentence, and even typesetting at the same time as she explores the complex relations between recovering addict Stephen, his much younger partner Eily, and Stephen's daughter Grace. Chris and Frances discuss formal experimentation too: the plot centres on Stephen screening an autobiographical film. McBride embeds the screenplay in The City Changes its Face alongside studies of the characters' reactions. Through the fuss over the film, and the reunion with Grace, the sexually assertive Eily becomes jealous over Stephen. McBride invokes her range of inventiveness to portray Eily's anguish. But would a fan of Molly Bloom want Eily to be a stronger feminist?

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Lynch’s Booker-winner is divisive. While Chris Murray wonders whether the characters in Prophet Song could be fleshed out, and the story of a fascist Ireland more fully realised, his guest says that this misses the point. Professor Christopher Morash (Trinity College Dublin) argues that Lynch’s purpose is to explore what happens to a person whose identity is gradually eroded. In a vividly portrayed suburban Dublin that steadily slips from view, narrator Eilish Stack first loses her husband, then her profession and her home, and faces the prospect of losing her children too. Morash says that Lynch is most interested in this reduction of a person to her basic impulse to survive, and that the story of Ireland’s decline into an authoritarian state is only a device to achieve this. While recent politics have made Prophet Song topical, Morash suggests that paying too much attention to the book’s political dimension means misreading Lynch’s experiment in ‘radical empathy’. Morash refers to playwright Sean O’Casey to show the Irish literary tradition at work in Prophet Song, in which civil war is so mutually harmful that the specific politics cease to matter. Murray wonders whether the book is too bleak, but Morash says that the closing image of the sea signals hope. Which perspective on Prophet Song seems right to you?

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Buy Prophet Song: https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/prophet-song-9780861545896

Guest:
Christopher Morash http://www.tcd.ie/English/staff/academic-staff/chris-morash.php

The Irish Books Podcast is proudly produced by East Coast Studio with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Monash University

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