Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, the recent winner of the Booker Prize, has gained deserved plaudits for its careful delineation of the gradual slide of a parallel Ireland from a democratic state into a form of fascist dictatorship. It is the measured and subtle way in which this is narrated that is the source of the book’s power and meaning. Interestingly, another Irish writer, also called Paul, has outlined a broadly similar process since 2017, albeit narrated in a comedic manner.
In Operation Trumpsformation, Paul Howard writes about Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s father Charles, a corrupt local politician who has designs on greater power. Charles, referred to as a disgraced property developer, local politician and founder of the political party, New Republic, is a right-wing crony capitalist.
Famous for wanting to be “tough on soccer, tough on the causes of soccer”; he responds to the recession by forming a document-disposal firm called Shred Focking Everything, destroying documents that could be evidence of wrongdoing. “People aren’t ready to hear what it was that made this country great for 11-and-a-little-bit years. All we’re doing is making sure that no one finds out,” he tells Ross.
He teaches Ross’s daughter to play an Irish property version of Monopoly, “capitalism in all its wonderful glory”, as he calls it, and when Honor wants to buy a house on Capel Street “she takes a hundred from her little pile of money and puts it into – hilariously – a little brown envelope”, and Charles then “slips it into his pocket – or ‘off-shore’.” He is unrepentant about his role in the Celtic Tiger, and the €48 million that he hid in Andorra. He and his solicitor-friend, Hennessy Coughlin-O’Hara, “are tendering to build a portion of this famous wall that Donald Trump wants to build”.
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[ Prophet Song by Paul Lynch: Totalitarian twists and turnsOpens in new window ]
For Howard, Charles embodies the cultural unconscious of Golden-Circle Ireland and this speaks directly in his books in a way that it can never do in the “real” Ireland; here it can eschew notions of wokeness and political correctness. This mentality is captured beautifully in a mother and son conversation about Covid-19: “Oh, we’re all fine up here, Ross. As I said to Delma on the phone, I just can’t imagine this thing [Covid-19] coming to Foxrock”.
Charles, as Taoiseach, aims to emulate Donald Trump and build a wall around Cork
There is a truth in fiction, and in Howard’s work, satire provides the mode for the telling of this truth. His parallel Ireland is a narrative mirror through which we can smile at the “real” Ireland, but also learn more about it than more normative discourses are often willing, or able, to disclose.
Charles, as Taoiseach, aims to emulate Donald Trump and build a wall around Cork. In, Dancing with the Tsars, he goes to war with feminists and installs his daughter-in-law Sorcha, Ross’s wife, as a Senator; while his wife, Fionnuala, is making trips to Russia foregrounding Charles’s links with Vladimir Putin.
Schmidt Happens sees Charles overtly working with shadowy Russian interests in order to become Taoiseach, while in Braywatch, he is caught attempting to fix the election. Charles has become Taoiseach, and moved to Áras an Uachtaráin, with Michael D Higgins and Sabina relegated to living in the attic and surviving on baked beans and toast. Charles is pressing ahead with Irexit and is busily selling off forests and Ireland’s riches (Newgrange has moved to Gorky Park in Moscow), as well as cosying up to Putin. He also burns down the Dáil.
In Once Upon a Time in… Donnybrook, we see Ross living in the aftermath of the burning down of Leinster House (Ireland’s own Reichstag fire), with Charles blaming the EU, and becoming ever more closely connected to the Russian-funded Mafia. And all this from a character who has seemed to be likeable in a buffoonish sort of way in the early books. Howard’s fictional truth here is that dictators often begin by being popular, and by setting out to solve complex problems with deceptively simplistic solutions.
[ Paul Howard: Ten things I’ve learned writing Ross O’Carroll-KellyOpens in new window ]
So, in this parallel Ireland there is also a housing crisis, but it has been solved by two unique inventions. In Normal Sheeple, the “hard of housing” are dealt with by living in “Homedrobes (living units the size of a hot-press)”, and sleeping in Vampire Beds (”people sleeping upright at a 45 degree angle”).
Howard’s series sets out a vision of a familiar Ireland, but one with a darker future. Charles, as a right-wing, corrupt, broadly fascist leader of a party that is racist, misogynist, classist and utterly capitalistic, has developed from being a figure of fun – and as readers, we still like him. This is the fictive truth of the series: a dictator always begins by being popular and by appealing to the most basic binary opposition to enhance this popularity, namely that of us and them.
Satire allows us to see the truth of some of the more unpleasant aspects of this imagined, parallel Ireland so that we may hopefully avoid it in the future of our real Ireland
The truth of this is reflected in contemporary Ireland, where we have seen protests against migrants being located in Irish towns, fires in some buildings wherein such migrants were to be housed and riots on the streets of Dublin. People who do this are often loud in their protestations that they are not racists, just as Charles is loud in his claims that all he does is done for patriotism.
Lynch shows the serious consequence of a descent into fascism on Eilish and Larry Stack and their children in Prophet Song. In the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, Howard does the same thing, and comedically it is highly effective as Charles, or “Chorles” as he is called in the South Dublin idiolect, is seen as a charming, loving and very forgiving father; whose classism, racism and misogyny are largely played for laughs and yet, in this book, he burns down the Dáil and teams up with the Russian Mafia to bleed Ireland of its natural resources. Howard makes us laugh, and like all great satirists, such as Swift and Flann O’Brien, he then makes us think about why we are laughing.
Satire allows us to see the truth of some of the more unpleasant aspects of this imagined, parallel Ireland so that we may hopefully avoid it in the future of our real Ireland. Howard’s series provides us with food for laughter and food for thought: long may it continue to do both.
Eugene O’Brien is professor of literature and theory in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, and his latest book Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly has just been published. It is part of the Routledge Studies in Irish Writing Series, which he also edits.
