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?

LINKS:
Irish Books Podcast on Blogspot: https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com

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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In this episode of Irish Books, historian Professor Dianne Hall joins Chris Murray to discuss Emma Donoghue’s The Paris Express, a book that brings aspects of the thriller genre to literary fiction.

Set aboard a train on a single day in 1895, The Paris Express assembles a cast of real figures, but in an alternate history in which they are propelled towards disaster. At the heart of the story is the tension between the young anarchist Mado Pelletier, who carries a bomb, and the only passenger who guesses her secret, the librarian and charity-worker Blonska.

Chris and Dianne explore Donoghue’s blend of historical research and imaginative reinvention, the novel’s queer aesthetic, and how the threat of impending destruction speaks to the sense of fragility in our own time. .

Dianne Hall is Professor of History at Victoria University, Melbourne.

LINKS:
Irish Books Podcast on Blogspot: https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com
Buy "Paris Express" https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781035057276/

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Guest:
Dianne Hall https://researchers.vu.edu.au/2149-dianne-hall

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.