The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press, 2020). Audiobook narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett.
Here are two images of this novel that sum it up best: a sweat lodge made from random old blankets, sleeping bags and jackets so that it looks like, the narrator says, a pile of hobos; and a woman with the head of an elk.
This is US horror writing in the mould of Stephen King: garage-door social realism; characters whose internal monologues bring them to life as much as their words and actions; incomprehensible passages about sports; monsters and apparitions that feel like an extension of the mundane world and are all the more horrible for that.
But as it goes on The Only Good Indians reveals a folk-tale quality that you don’t find in King.
It’s set around a Blackfoot reservation in the present day, and the story is steeped in the grim conditions in which the Indians live (that’s the term the author and characters use). Lewis has made it to his mid-30s without dying of diabetes or an overdose or suicide or a car crash, or freezing to death after passing out, and he considers that a small miracle. Don’t tempt fate: the first quarter of the book depicts his complete unravelling, his descent into blood-soaked psychosis. The apparition of the elk-head woman drives him to it.
Lewis is one of four friends in the crosshairs of this monster. When they were in their early twenties, they committed a transgression which involved blowing a pregnant elk to pieces with rifle fire. Ten years later a dangerous elk spirit has come for revenge – not only to kill them but to destroy everything they love.
Each one of these Indian characters feels like a traumatised survivor of some terrible war. Each one of them has managed to get through some bad shit and to put their lives together. As death comes to claim them one by one, it feels wasteful and hopeless. The worst part is, it feels true: people who fight their way up out of a bad situation and build new lives for themselves are always prey to some demon from the past catching up with them.
Twice while reading this novel, once at the one-quarter mark and once at the three-quarter mark, I stopped reading and put it aside, disgusted with it. ‘So it’s like that,’ I thought. ‘Every woman in the story has to die a horrible – and improbable – death.’ The brutality felt capricious and meaningless. We’re supposed to think the elk-head woman was pushing an open door when she turned Lewis into a murderous ghoul, but to me when the killing started it felt too abrupt. It’s difficult to get invested in one character only to switch to some others two-three hours in.
But both times I gave it a week and came back to it, and found myself drawn in again. It’s not really like that. It really is going somewhere, building up to something. Not every woman and man dies. There is a way out.
Denorah, the teenage daughter of one of the four men, is the only ‘calf’ any of them produced. She is a brilliant basketball player, someone who will really make her tribe proud one day. After a long sequence involving the makeshift sweat lodge which builds slowly from tense humour to pure horror, Denorah finds herself in the crosshairs of the elk-head woman. The final struggle falls to her.
That’s where I am now: in the last half-hour of the audiobook with no idea if the ending is going to come down on the side of the things I liked or the things I didn’t like. While he nearly lost me once or twice, now I’m convinced Jones knows what he’s doing, and I’m keen to see how it all ends.
[Edit 26 May 2024: the ending brought it all together. Even better than I hoped.]
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We live in an age of excess – excess of consumer products, of information, of outrageous and unbearable things happening in the world. Maybe that’s why Denis Villeneuve and co, in Dune: Part Two, endeavour to overload the brains of the audience with images grotesque and surreal but also solid and tangible, and on occasion, too, to contrast this excess with stark desert simplicity.
Most of the major landmarks in the story are there, such as Jessica, then later Paul, taking the water of life; Paul riding a sandworm; Feyd-Rautha in the arena; and the final climactic battle (the family atomics, ‘a great-grandmother of a storm’…) The film interprets these landmark moments with extraordinary technique and inspiration. When Paul mounts a worm for the first time it’s truly scary and intense. I’ve seen this moment on film twice before, but I never got anything close to a sense of how viscerally terrifying it would be to really do this. The Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime is not just ugly, but an unsettling, distressing place to spend 20-30 minutes. The filmmakers have taken the time to show us how the spice drug is taken from a drowned worm, how moisture is sucked out of the dead (and sometimes the still-living!), and what a palanquin mounted on a worm looks like.
The landmarks are there, and rendered with power and intensity. But the routes between them are changed. It’s that type of adaptation.
For example, the first action scene is completely new; mst of Paul and Chani’s dialogue is not from the book (though it fits right in); Paul learns to ride a sandworm a lot earlier; Paul receiving the name ‘Mu’ad Dib’ comes a lot later.
(By the way, a line uttered by Paul when he comes face to face with Baron Vladimir Harkonnen suggests that this adaptation is set in one of the alternate timelines foreseen by Paul in the novel.)
But it goes beyond that. Things are not changed only for the sake of economy or clarity. The biggest changes are in the service of tackling the defects of the book – the stress placed on bloodlines and eugenics; the white saviour enlisting the credulous natives; Chani, the most obliging of this very obliging bunch of natives, consenting to being Don Paul’s goomah while he marries someone else. In the novel the Fremen, for all their pride and ferocity, never call bullshit on the ridiculous aristocratic institutions to which Paul expects them to bow down, or on the Bene Gesserit’s shameless manipulation of faith in the service of their insane agenda.
In the movie, each major character (Stilgar, Jessica, Chani, Gurney) is aligned to an agenda, and exerts an influence on Paul; it’s a laser focus as regards character that pares things right down, renders conflicts more extreme and dramatic.
This film rejects space feudalism and eugenics; look at Chani’s reaction when Gurney Halleck speaks of Paul’s ‘bloodline,’ in the context of her earlier statement about how all Fremen are equal.
If you’ve seen the film, you know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t I won’t spoil it. But in this movie the Fremen are not extras who wandered off the set of The Life of Brian ready to fall for the first messiah who climbs up on a soap box. In this movie Chani’s pride and self-respect do not allow her to be such a pushover as she is in the novel (‘History will call us wives’). Paul’s political choices have consequences for him and others. He really hurts Chani.
1984’s Dune ended on a note of triumph; 2000’s TV version is true to the novel in that it mostly leaves you with good feelings. This movie takes the book’s undercurrent of tragedy and drags it to centre stage. The jihad is not a foggy prediction; it’s kicking off right before our eyes. Paul’s victory has come at a terrible cost, personified in a specific character who, in this adaptation, serves as his conscience.
This ending meant that I left the cinema not with a sense of ‘all’s well that ends well’ but with a strange feeling, something rich and contradictory between triumph, relief and sadness.
High praise so far. What do I not like about the adaptation?
I felt that the script relied too heavily on named Harkonnen characters brutally assaulting and killing their underlings; it’s repetitive, ugly and unsubtle.
There was one thing I couldn’t get out of my mind. Every time I saw Jessica after the first hour or so my reaction was, ‘Jesus, is she still pregnant?’ Speaking of Jesus, it’s written that he was three years preaching before his crucifixion. Now imagine a movie where Jesus dethrones Tiberius Caesar just three months after he begins his ministry. Just ask anyone who has ever been involved in a pregnancy or, I assume, in a jihad: a guerrilla war takes longer than a trimester. In the book we cut away for two years, then return to find Paul at last ready to ride a sandworm. Even two years was cutting it fine. How do Paul and Jessica get millions of Fremen eating out of their hands in just six months? The movie works hard to get us away from the white saviour narrative stuff, but this telescoping of the timeline sends us back a large part of the way.
Linked to this, I missed a certain omniscient syringe-wielding toddler who didn’t make the cut.
[Edit, 8 mar 2024.] Here’s another problem. Would it kill Hollywood directors to give speaking roles to actors from the Middle East? What’s the terrible thing that would happen if you gave roles to people from the country you filmed in (or countries where they speak the same language, or practise the same religion)? I didn’t want to raise it at first, because with Dune it’s always going to be a fine line between accusing authors of erasure and accusing them of appropriation. But it occurs to me that just hiring some Arab or Muslim talent is neither erasure nor appropriation. Ridley Scott hired Ghassan Massoud to play Salah ad-Din (Saladin) in Kingdom of Heaven – and the sky did not fall on our heads. Dune borrows so heavily from the Muslim world. It should start paying back.
To see this movie on the big screen was to be put through a succession of intense and unexpected experiences. Sometimes you’ll see a movie that has some great moments, images or scenes, but just isn’t great overall. But in Dune: Part Two, it all adds up to something powerful and brilliant. And as an adaptation, it favours the things I like in Frank Herbert’s novel, and militates against the things I find embarrassing. In particular it leans hard into the tragedy and dread that make the ending of the novel Dune so different.
The new Dune is phenomenal. Two-plus years ago Dune: Part One got me out to the cinema for the first time since Covid and it was exhilerating. Part Two is reported to be even better. But Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune has been adapted for the screen before, more than once. I have seen all these adaptations, because I have a strange fascination with Dune which is part nostalgia because I first read it aged 14, part a mature realisation that the things we enjoy don’t have to coincide with the things we believe in, and part, no doubt, reasons that could be best explained by Freud (sandworms), Marx (family retainers) and Edward Said (white saviour complex).
Freudian beasts, their hour come round at last, slouching toward Arrakeen. From the 2000 TV version, dir. John Harrison.
Enough deprecation. I also like this story because it’s exciting, intelligent and haunting. The author takes politics, economics and ecology seriously while telling a great story. How well has that translated to the screen?
This review will take a look at David Lynch’s 1984 movie, the Sci Fi Channel’s 2000 miniseries, and Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of the first half of the novel.
Villeneuve is talking about adapting the Dune sequels. In a bit of a sequel to this post, we will look at the 2003 adaptation of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.
Three different versions of the ornithopter from, top to bottom, 1984, 2000 and 2021.
Harkonnen Horror Picture Show
God created 1984’s Dune to train the faithful. For every good thing I can say about it, there’s a bad thing too, and vice versa.
To begin with, something bothers me about the interiors. The Atreides live in surroundings of Victorian frumpiness, gaudy but flat, like the decor in Boris Johnson’s house; the Harkonnens in a green-lit space slaughterhouse. For all the implicit homophobia in the way the Baron is portrayed, something about the campiness of the whole set-up makes me think the whole evil cabal might jump out of their chairs and start singing ‘Time Warp’ at any moment. But other elements of the visual design are brilliant – the guild spice navigator and his cohorts, who prefigure the fascinating visual excess of Warhammer 40,000; the tonsured Bene Gesserit; the faceless rubber menace of the Harkonnen troops.
The spaceships look cool; but the visual sequence in which the guild navigator bends time is slow, unclear and not necessary.
I like the weirding modules. These are invented out of whole cloth for the movie: in short the Atreides have a special weapon that can kill with the utterance of a sharp syllable. This idea fits pretty well in the world of Dune and helps the story along. For example, it explains what’s so special about Paul from the point of view of the Fremen: he brings a powerful new weapon to the table. But the shields, personal force-fields used by combatants in the universe of Dune, look silly.
Top to bottom: Kenneth McMillan, Ian McNiece, and Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Top to bottom, the colour pallettes of a 1980s movie, a TV show from 2000 and a 2020s movie
The movie is rushed and incoherent. It might have gotten away with telling such a huge story in just over two hours, but it goes out of its way to be confusing and to trip us up on irrelevant things. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who hasn’t read the books being able to follow what’s going on. But the final half-hour strides along with a formidable momentum and plenty of cool imagery.
At the very end of the movie it suddenly rains on Arrakis – a development that makes no sense in the logic of the world, but which is absolute magic on a simple storytelling and thematic level. I can see why they couldn’t resist.
It’s a movie I could talk about, back and forth, is it good or is it bad, for a long time.
The guild spice navigator, from the 1984 Dune, dir David Lynch
A very delicate time
The opening of 1984 Dune is problematic in ways that are thrown into sharp relief by the quality of the 2021 Dune’s opening. In 1984 Dune, we begin with Princess Irulan, a very formal narrator who stares straight into the camera and explains things, followed by a scene in the imperial throne room. In 2021 Dune we begin with Chani narrating over a striking visual sequence.
The 2021 approach is more democratic and materialist, centring the indigenous Fremen and the key resource they control rather than the galactic aristocracy. But it is also much better from a storytelling point of view: it is rooted in real and tangible things, while narrators and the high politics of throne rooms are distant and abstract. Chani is narrating but also participating in a sequence that conveys visually the importance of the spice, the oppression of the Fremen by the Harkonnen, and the transfer of power from the Harkonnens to another noble house.
The guild spice navigator in the 1984 Dune is a top-tier movie monster. In the books we don’t see him until Dune Messiah, but here he makes his grand entrance in the opening sequence. Unfortunately that is a big problem. Although he is cool, he is one of several big things that we don’t need to know about this universe right away, or at all. But the movie goes out of its way to foreground him.
From the 2021 Dune, dir Denis Villeneuve. Murky.
Comedians of Dune
The Harkonnen scenes in the 1984 Dune leave me with a vague impression of grotesque-looking people bellowing and jabbering monstrous things at one another, punctuated with maniacal cackling. The 2021 Dune is a bit humourless by comparison. There is an early moment in which Paul and Duncan Idaho share a chuckle. But that is an oasis in a desert of dourness.
There is, to be fair, one other joke in the movie:
‘Smile, Gurney,’ says Duke Leto.
Scowling, Gurney replies: ‘I am smiling.’
Someone has decided to make Gurney ‘the grumpy one.’ It’s a good joke, delivered well by the actors. Is the movie taking a dig at its own serious tone? Or is it opening itself up to the retort: ‘Which grumpy one?’
Still, the 2021 Dune is better in almost every way. The storytelling and worldbuilding are far more skilful, conscious, economical; the screenwriters treat words as the Fremen treat water. The visuals play with light and shade, convey weight, grit, thirst, scale. It does not lack that essential quality: weirdness, accident, quirkiness (Who thought of giving the Atreides bagpipes? Give them a medal) but it doesn’t allow that element, either, to get in the way of the story.
In any adaptation, fidelity to the original is not crucial for me. Things have to change in the move from one medium to another. A change for the better, or a change necessary for the medium, justifies itself. But for what it’s worth, the 2021 Dune is much more faithful to the original. Both other adaptations resort to arming their extras with projectile firearms. But in the book and the 2021 version, shields have rendered firearms obsolete, and combat is primarily a hand-to-hand affair.
Budgets of Dune
An even smaller point against the 2021 Dune is its portrayal of the city of Arrakeen. In a movie that cost $165 million to make, this key location appears to be nothing more than a scale model, entirely devoid of human life. The 2000 TV adaptation, working with a budget of $20 million, manages to convey a lively and bustling place. (In case you’re wondering, the 1984 Dune cost about $40 million.)
The same moment in three different versions: fleeing by ornithopter as a sandworm eats a spice factory. Top to bottom, 1984, 2000 and 2021.
Now we come to the most obscure adaptation, Frank Herbert’s Dune, a three-part miniseries for the Sci Fi Channel written and directed by John Harrison.
(It was one of three very fine miniseries released by the Sci Fi Channel around that time, along with Steven Spielberg’s UFO epic Taken and Battlestar Galactica. The latter ended up running to the proverbial six seasons. It was an underappreciated moment in the history of ‘prestige TV’.)
I’ll level with you up front: Frank Herbert’s Dune is not visually spectacular – the CGI is dated and some of the costumes look tacky.
But the actors are impressive. It is long not because it is bloated, but because it has made a conscious decision to tell the story more fully and faithfully, without unseemly haste. Everything about this adaptation is confident and assured, as if having a smaller budget gave it much more freedom.
And about that CGI: on a technical level, it would not pass muster today. (Though nostalgia or irony might induce people to deliberately copy this style in the future – stranger things have happened). The images are well-composed and are shot and edited in such a way that, interspersed with live-action footage, they tell a compelling and comprehensible story. A lot of today’s filmmakers could learn a lot from how the CGI is used here, how John Harrison does so much with relatively little. The result is that a CGI-heavy action scene, such as when the spice factory is eaten by a worm, is a genuinely tense experience.
In a fantastic scene, the ‘Beast Rabban’ gets a personal comeuppance he never gets in the novel when he is killed by a mob in the streets of Arrakeen. I guess budget dictates that some additional scenes must happen in this set, to justify the expense of building it; but budgetary needs can coincide with storytelling needs. It is satisfying to see this showdown happen in this familiar place. In the novel, by contrast, we are told in the most perfunctory Shakespearian way that ‘Rabban, too, is dead’ – offscreen somewhere.
I don’t want to over-praise something that, after all, will have dated poorly, especially measured against the new big-budget spectacle. But here’s one last piece of praise: Frank Herbert’s Dune is the only adaptation to leave in the crucial banquet scene (into which it inserts the Princess Irulan and a bodyguard of Sardaukar. It’s important later that we know who these people are, so it makes sense to feature them here).
It was shot in Czechia, and you can decide for yourself whether that (a) results in lamentable whitewashing of the Middle Eastern elements or (b) to your great relief, distances the adaptation from the wild orientalism of the novel.
Paul in stillsuit watches a sandworm’s back cresting the sand. From the 2000 version.
Recommendations of Dune
If you want a spectacular modern science fiction epic, well-conceived and well-executed, with current stars and big budget, you should watch the Denis Villeneuve Dune.
If, like me, you are really into Dune and also interested in the process of storytelling and adaptation, these versions are all deeply intriguing.
If, like me, you are interested in things that are good but also kind of bad, you should watch David Lynch’s Dune. The highs and lows are equally bold and striking.
If you liked the 2021 Dune and want to know more, but aren’t much of a reader or can’t get into the books, the 2000 miniseries is a good place to go to delve deeper into the story. It would be a good option for someone who prefers the pacing and serial form of TV shows. It also has the great advantage that it has a direct sequel to introduce you to the later books in the series.
Next week I’ll talk about that sequel: the novels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, along with the TV miniseries Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (2003). Stay tuned for that if you want to hear about how a low-budget TV adaptation can be better than the source material. Until then, enjoy Dune: Part Two.
This is a post about how the internet is getting worse. It’s about so-called ‘AI’, chatbots and plagiarism, and how they are churning out utterly useless rubbish for the sole purpose of getting your eyes onto their ads and their cookies onto your device.
Today it emerged that a local authority in the middle of Ireland was cheated out of half a million euros. Here is a report from the Irish Independent, published earlier today, reporting on the revelations of fraud.
I saw the Irish Independent article less than an hour after it was published. Less than an hour later, a website called ‘BNN, The People’s Network’ had an article up on the same topic. I will not link to this article, because if you go there you will have to spend 3-5 minutes manually opting out of various ‘legitimate interest’ cookie options.
The sub-heading invites us to ‘Explore the high-stakes drama at Westmeath County Council.’ The article begins: ‘In the heart of Ireland, a story unfolds that reads more like a thriller novel than a report from the municipal offices.’
But what follows is neither thrilling nor dramatic. We don’t explore or discover anything. There is no story. It is the exact same items of information that are in the Irish Independent article, but strewn around and hidden in ridiculous overwritten paragraphs:
‘The digital age brings with it incredible opportunities, but also unfathomable risks. The road to recovery for Westmeath County Council will be paved with lessons learned the hard way. It’s a testament to the resilience of the community and the individuals determined to restore what was lost […] While the investigation continues, and the council rebuilds, the story […] underscores the importance of vigilance, transparency, and the unbreakable spirit of community in the face of adversity.’
You’d think Westmeath had been struck by a terrorist or a decent-sized meteor.
There is nothing in the ‘People’s Network’ article that is not in the Independent article – except for one thing (or, the same thing repeated again and again, because everything is said at least three times): references to cybersecurity. No public statement has made any reference to cyber crime, or indicated that this was digital fraud.
At first I thought this was written by a human, content-mill crap, a step above plagiarism. But pretty soon I figured it was a chatbot.
How could I tell it was a bot?
1: Plagiarism. It was obvious to me because I’d just read the Indo article: there was nothing new here. Someone took the Indo article and fed it into a programme, which spat out this.
2: No sense of proportion. This thing was composed by an entity that has no inkling of what Westmeath is or what fraud is or what a euro is. It’s a trained predictive typing trick that arranges words in a plausible order. ‘The Chief Executive of Westmeath County Council is poised to make an official statement, a move that many await with bated breath.’ I live in Westmeath, and no, my breath is not bated.
3: Good grammar, terrible prose. I like to believe that a human, even the worst hack, would get nauseous writing such a cascade of clichés (‘reads more like a thriller’…’at the center of a high-stakes drama’…’a cornerstone of its relationship’…’this incident is a wake-up call’…’it serves as a poignant reminder’… ‘it’s a stark reminder of’…’underscores the importance of’…’underscores the critical need for’… A writer who takes some else’s writing and, within two hours, has it cannibalised and regurgitated, might be expected to make some mistakes on the spelling and grammar. If this writer, in addition, writes not in words but in stock phrases, they are likely to have problems with word order and sentence construction. But even that bad human writer would be more interesting. They would not be determined to say that everything is a reminder, a wake-up call or an underscore. They would get bored with the constant resort to bland linking phrases.
4: Repetition and needless elaboration. Most of the word count of the article is totally unnecessary. For example, the chatbot tells us the same thing four times: ‘[1] The details of this fraud have been kept under wraps, not out of secrecy, but to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation. [2] Elected members of the council, though informed, have remained tight-lipped, respecting the delicate nature of the situation. [3] The Mayor of Athlone-Moate Municipal District, when approached for comment, respectfully declined, citing the active probe into the matter. […] [4] As the Gardaí delve deeper into the investigation, there’s a palpable tension between wanting to know more and the need to maintain a veil of confidentiality for the sake of justice.’
5: Obvious mistakes. The bot somehow got the wrong end of the stick. For some reason it thought this was a story about cyber crime.
6: Blandness. The story is scattered with phrases like ‘a breach of trust’ and words like ‘shockwaves’ that suggest the author is pretty excited, and that you should be too. But there is no criticism of anyone. ‘The council’s response, swift and thorough, reflects a commitment to accountability and a resolve to strengthen its defenses against future threats.’ A human would either stick to the facts (the Indo reporter presents all the information concisely) or present an opinion. This chatbot gives the impression that it has an opinion, but it’s the most boring opinion you could possibly imagine: the moral of the story is ‘fraud is bad.’ There is no meaning behind this. No feelings or ideas animate these words.
This story of content mills and chatbots is as a stark reminder of, serves as a poignant reminder of, underscores the importance of, and is a wake-up call about the attention economy and how the profit motive is spreading rot throughout the internet. I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t actually kind of fun to play spot the bot. But the article you have just read (which, I hope you agree, reads more like a thriller than a blog post) will age poorly, because I predict that soon most of us will be dismally accustomed to chatbot-generated meaningless content, to having to navigate this crap in order to use the internet.
That was Mark Kermode’s verdict on Jimmy the robot from Rebel Moon. This sums up what Kermode and many others have said about director Zack Snyder’s new space adventure movie: that it’s a rip-off of Star Wars, that it’s staggeringly derivative.
I usually like Kermode but actually Jimmy isn’t much like 3-CP0. He’s a humanoid robot with an English accent – OK. But there have been a lot of human-shaped robots since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It’s pretty much the default shape for robots. And English accents are not rare; Mark Kermode has one.
Jimmy is a military robot, designed to kill, not a protocol droid who can speak 6 million languages. C-3P0 is pedantic and cowardly and pessimistic. Jimmy, on the other hand, has an interesting and messy internal life. Unlike C-3P0 he is dignified, and he is played for sympathy, not for laughs. He was programmed to defend a certain princess, and now that she’s dead he can’t fight – until something unexpected suddenly restores his capacity for violence.
This incident has placed him on an interesting trajectory. When we see him in one of the final shots of the movie, having not seen him at all for over an hour, he has undergone a strange transformation – a kind of robotic midlife crisis, resulting in new feral headgear. It’s a striking image.
I didn’t particularly want to like Rebel Moon and I didn’t see myself writing about it here, slightly pedantically defending it from a critical pile-on. Of Snyder’s precious films, 300 impressed me at 16 but in retrospect it was a crazy and fascist movie, drawn from an equally crazy and fascist comic. I haven’t seen a Snyder film since Watchmen. I know that Rebel Moon started out as a rejected pitch for a Star Wars movie. In the trailer, the action looked weightless, the characters dour. I thought it would be Star Wars without any humour or character, and with a reactionary political edge.
But honestly, contrary to what most of the critics are saying, Rebel Moon carves out its own space and is its own thing. I watch everything in 20 or 30 minute stretches these days, between changing nappies, sleeping and going to work, so the length of the movie didn’t bother me as I didn’t watch it in one sitting. But if I didn’t really like it, I wouldn’t have kept coming back.
From the start, Rebel Moon struck me as more like Warhammer 40K or Dune than Star Wars: there’s the solemn choral music and the baroque Gothic style of the bad guys. This tone promise was borne out: the whole movie is edgier than anything Lucas made. It’s not exactly Come and See but it’s more for teenage boys (of all ages and genders) than for the whole family.
The early scenes with the good guys are also very un-Star Wars. They talk about sex, joke about it, and have it barely off-screen, which is something most action-adventure films of our era are terrified to do because they want to pack all age groups into the cinema. That’s refreshing. Also, these pagan farmers appear to be having a really good time even when they aren’t riding each other. For me, all this was unexpected and endearing.
The arrival of the bad guys is really tense. This sequence follows Hitchcock’s ‘bomb under the table’ principle. Yes, thanks critics, it’s obvious they’re bad space fascists and they’re going to do bad things. But we don’t know exactly what they are going to do, or when. Hence the tension.
The imperial soldiers are not faceless stormtroopers. They’re macho bullies and rapists, apart from one decent guy; they have horrible personalities, but the point is that they have personalities. In another 40k nod, their armour spans the gap gracefully between futuristic and baroque.
Contrary to what I expected, the fight scenes actually kick arse. They have real weight and are gritty. The energy weapons have a kick to them.
There are plenty of genre tropes in the first 40 minutes. But there are few specifically Star Wars tropes until Kora and Gunnar (look! I remembered their names 3 weeks later) take in a vista of a town from a clifftop before proceeding into a cantina full of exotic and dangerous-looking figures. From there it turns away from Star Wars again and becomes a ’round up a posse’ story, drawing from Kurosawa himself, not Kurosawa filtered through George Lucas.
There are plenty of moments where the movie is a visual feast. But sometimes the environments look like stage backdrops, and even when they don’t look like it they behave like it. When our heroes meet the Bloodaxes, it might as well be happening on a theatre stage because there is no interaction with the floaty columns that loom in the background. Towards the end, which is not really an end but a lull before the next movie, the characters keep saying wooden portentous things clearly designed to get the ending to feel more ending-y. That’s clumsy. I found most of the slow motion stuff unnecessary and distracting. A slo-mo shot of seeds being sown – what is that for?
The Bloodaxes keep saying the word ‘Revolution,’ without every giving us the slightest notion of what their revolution is about. In this sense too the movie is distinct from Star Wars: it finds a way to be evenmore apolitical. Unfortunately Rebel Moon also goes so far as to hint that the evil empire might be redeemed by a slightly more compassionate absolute monarch, one who can heal little birdies with her bare hands.
Once again, like in Dune and Star Wars, we have space feudalism. The assumption that a lot of dukes and emperors would be able to manage interstellar travel, when our modern capitalists have such trouble even getting off the ground, is a strange one, but again it’s a genre trope and hardly unique to this movie.
The whole thing is basically limited and on the shallow end, but it’s gripping, pacy and well-executed. Take the masked priest characters who lurk in the background ominously for the whole movie, until the final scenes when we at last learn what their function is and see them at work. That’s cool. The script is pretty likeable. When a bunch of nameless good characters are killed in battle toward the end of the movie, we afterwards get a moment of tribute and mourning – something we rarely get in Star Wars, where there’s an unwritten rule that nameless characters are disposable.
It’s a shame this kind of budget isn’t going to a movie adaptation of some piece of space sci-fi by, say, Ian M Banks or Ann Leckie, or some original adventure drawing on their ideas. That’s my main problem here: there are lots of little sci-fi tropes and elements in Rebel Moon, but no big Science Fiction ideas animating the story, no consistent through-line in the worldbuilding.
I thought the Avatar sequel, Dune: Part One and Andor were all brilliant in very diferent ways. Rebel Moon is not on that level – it’s not so original or intelligent. But the critics are wrong. It hits the targets it sets out to hit. And it’s only ‘like Star Wars‘ in the sense that they both belong to the same genre. In the same way Notting Hill is like Meet the Parents in that they are both rom coms. In the way that 300 is like Gladiator. In the way that Watchmen is like an Avengers movie.
Saying that Jimmy is C-3P0 is just pointing out that they both have human shapes and English accents. It’s not demonstrating anything, except ignorance or maybe disregard for the genre. Likewise, pointing out that Rebel Moon is like Star Wars is actually saying nothing more than ‘These two films are action-adventure movies set in space.’
Spinning off from my recent post on Age of Empires 2, here are my musings on what way I think the ‘ages’ should have worked in that game.
The earliest ‘ages’ would be nomadic and clan societies.
Nomadic
AoE2 could use a nomadic ‘age’ – in which, for example, the Mongols could exist on the move across the game map with their herds of sheep. Transitioning to a settled feudal existence would bring both benefits (such as the ability to build better fortifications and more diverse units) and costs (such as the decline in skill of horse archer units as the generation of former nomads is succeeded by their children, who are more familiar with stately pleasure domes). This ‘age’ would be available to any faction willing to pick up sticks. But it would be the default for the Mongols, the Seljuk Turks and others. The loading bar from Nomadic to sedentary could be triggered once you have built a couple of permanent structures, could be accelerated by building more, could be reversed by their destruction.
Clan
This is a relatively egalitarian clan society whose economy is based around common ownership, whose mode of warfare revolves around raiding. The ‘villagers’ could double as decent skirmisher units to represent the clan levy, alongside normal but basic military units. (Instead we have ‘The Dark Age,’ something which is neither here nor there: people who have farms but nonetheless live in tents, whose armed forces are guys with clubs.) The loading bar which brings this ‘age’ to an end could be triggered by the building of a certain number of military buildings and units – which brings about the development of a special military class.
Feudal
The consolidation of power by the feudal nobility could be the basis for a proper ‘Feudal Age’ – now we have mounted and armoured knights, motte and bailey castles, manors as the basic agricultural building. There would be no need for a ‘Castle Age;’ Feudalism would have enough mileage to encompass that. For example, upgrading the motte and bailey to a stone castle. The benefits include a free military unit for every manor you build; but the cost is, you lose the clan levy and reduce the ‘villagers’ to the feeble non-military units we are familiar with.
Renaissance
The next shift in ages could be triggered by buildings such as the Market – heavy use of markets and trade usher in the Renaissance. The traders could increase resource production at the cost of taking some of it out of the player’s control, making it subject to hoarding and market crashes.
Centralised Empire
We could also have an ‘age’ characterised by a strong emperor, centralised authority and an efficient civil service, as we see in medieval China. This social order could be difficult to achieve but versatile and robust.
I like this general idea because rather than ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ ages we have social orders each of which come with their own costs and benefits. Yes, some social orders allow for more efficient resource-gathering and production. But each, played right, can work on its own terms. And each has considerable mileage within its own limits, reducing further the incentive to change. We also move beyond both national stereotypes (Rise of Nations) and the reductive ‘balanced’ approach of making all factions identical. We have minor or cosmetic differences between factions, but the real difference is between social orders.
Around the start of this millennium, the adults were worried about how Grand Theft Auto would turn my generation into serial killers. The ultra-violence of GTA was probably too outrageous and obvious to have much effect. Meanwhile, far less controversial games were warping the way we thought about the world. Today I’m going to take a critical look at a classic that is still widely-played today: Age of Empires 2. AoE2 is a strategy game from 1999 that purports to be set in the Middle Ages. But it gives a totally wrong impression of how the Middle Ages worked.
What’s my angle here? Do I think Age of Empires and Command and Conquer should have been banned? No, the world would be a less fun place without them. But all the ink spilled condemning GTA would have been better spent making an informed, sympathetic criticism of a game like AoE2. People who liked and enjoyed the game, but also had read a few books about the actual Middle Ages, should have had a platform to tell us what it got wrong.
Strengths
First, the strengths of AoE2. You don’t need me to tell you it’s a satisfying and addictive game. Take that as read. As for how it depicts the Middle Ages, there are good points. The campaigns strike a balance between compelling narrative, satisfying challenges and historical fidelity. The William Wallace campaign is a perfectly-ramped-up tutorial with a good story, and to this day ‘Falkirk’ and ‘Stirling’ are taking up space in my memory banks. Also, there are paragraphs of proper historical information on offer, if you care to pause the game and do some reading.
The gameplay itself has its strengths. It conveys one important lesson about history: before you can put armies in the field, you need to have a lot of people working hard producing stuff. And unlike in C&C where there’s one all-purpose resource (ore or tiberium), AoE and AOE2 demand that you build a relatively complex and diverse economy. Twenty minutes into a game, you have built a busy little town: your villagers are mining, farming, hunting and gathering, slaughtering sheep, cutting down trees; little boats are bringing in nets full of fish to your docks; little carts and trade cogs are moving between settlements. It’s diverse and interdependent, and as you play, human activity gradually consumes the forests and the wildlife, and the grass is turned into neat rows of crops. It’s not just satisfying to play and nice to look at; this basic rhythm of gameplay is authentic.
Genocide
So here are my criticisms of AoE2 from a historical perspective. I’m not going to talk about how the Elite Long Swordsman has the wrong type of sword or the Frankish blacksmith model is inaccurate. I am going to talk about its overall concept of society and warfare in the Middle Ages, and how it gave a whole generation fundamentally the wrong idea.
AoE2 still depends on the C&C formula in its basic structure: build a base, build an army, destroy the enemy. That’s OK in a game where you play as a military commander and your task is to destroy a military base. But in the AoE variant, you are not destroying a military base. You are destroying a whole society. You have to exterminate the ‘enemy.’ You have to level his city and his infrastructure. Not take it over – demolish it.
I won’t labour this point as it was expressed well in this post from acoup.blog. But while the grown-ups were worried about us jacking a car and doing hit and runs, we were meanwhile playing a supposedly more wholesome and educational game, in which we were required to do genocide. And 100% anachronistic and unnecessary genocide, at that. The fact that so many who grew up playing AoE have stood by while their countries killed vast numbers of people with bombs and guns has broader roots than one videogame, of course. But games like this are part of the tapestry.
The intro video is clever. The game of chess is a nod to the fact that we are playing a game. Blunting the edge of many of the criticisms I will make here, the video suggests that like chess, the game you are about to play is only supposed to be an approximation of real life.
Society
Let’s return to that pretty medieval town you have built. How many farms have you got? Five, six, seven? And how many other buildings have you got – a monastery, a barracks, a castle, a market, a blacksmith, a stable, an archery range, a town centre…? You’ve got at least as many other building types as you have farms. You might easily have twice as many.
Throughout most of human history, and certainly in the Middle Ages in Europe, the overwhelming mass of the population worked in agriculture. In AoE2, the heavy toil which defined the lives of 95% of the population is represented by five villagers hoeing little plots of land. The farms, little patches on the margins of the base, are like gardening allotments on the edge of a housing estate.
Why does this matter? Because a lot of guys are walking around out there with the vague idea that if they had lived back in the middle ages they would have been knights. White people are actually the worst offenders with the ‘We used to be kings’ meme. In reality, most of us don’t have to go back as far as the Middle Ages to discover that our direct ancestors were super-exploited peasants with no freedom. It took the labour of a whole village to arm and mount a single knight. Again, AoE2 is only one artefact of the culture that produces these wrong ideas, but it is under-examined.
Sometimes you can see how shallowly the C&C formula is buried. Your attractive medieval settlement can stand in for a military camp, a city or an entire civilisation, depending on the scenario. But it is what it is: a base. Likewise the game treats the player as a commander in a modern military, with life-and-death control over the entire faction.
As soon as you read any real medieval history, it becomes clear how absurd this is. Medieval history is mostly about the church revolting against the king and/or the secular nobles, the nobles revolting against the king or feuding with one another, the peasants revolting against the nobility, and the town people revolting against all of the above. AoE2 is about players (human or AI) who have absolute control over an entire society, waging war on another equally monolithic society.
A real medieval polity was not united but feudal. A king had to negotiate through layers of autonomous lords and knights to get anything done. Its settlement pattern was very much dispersed, not nucleated like the AoE/C&C base. A ‘knight’ was not just a cavalry fighter who was good against archers and weak against pikes. For your medieval ancestor, the knight was the equivalent of your mayor, your boss in work, a military officer, and a made guy in the mafia.
There is a ‘Feudal Age’ in AoE2. But the game does not simulate feudalism – it simulates a caricature of a totalitarian communist state.
For those who haven’t played it, this is what actual gameplay looks like.
Ages
Speaking of ‘ages’ – in AoE2, the player progresses through four: the Dark Age, the Feudal Age, the Castle Age and the Imperial Age. Each age unlocks new buildings, units, technologies, etc. But these ages do not correspond to anything in real life. In the first AoE they roughly did. But not here. The game covers the period from around 500CE to around 1500CE. The ‘Dark Age’ does not correspond even roughly to 500-750, nor the ‘Feudal Age’ to 750-1000, etc. There is too little in the early ages by way of buildings, tech and unit types, then all of a sudden too much in the later ages. No, the Catholic church was not ‘unlocked’ a hundred or two hundred years after the First Crusade. Stuff from the ‘Castle Age’ was 100% around throughout this whole millennium.
All in all, the game does a particularly poor job of depicting the early Middle Ages. A battle in the ‘Dark Age’ is limited to guys with clubs hitting each other. But there was a bit more than that going on during the age of Al-Andalus, the Merovingians and the Tang Dynasty.
In the real middle ages, The Catholic Church pretty much had a monopoly on literacy, education, social services and bureaucracy across most of Europe for most of a millennium. In AoE2, the clergy don’t show up until the third ‘age’ of four.
The Marxist idea of a mode of production offers a better template for social development than the idea of a linear progression of ‘ages.’ (Here, I went off on a tangent proposing how this could actually work in a game, but to spare the reader I have moved it to an appendix which I will post next week.)
All I’ll say now is, instead of different ages, I wish we could see different social orders. Returning to the Marxist criterion: sure, the mercantilist and feudal social orders have a greater productivity of labour than the nomadic society or the trans-egalitarian clan society. But depending on the situation, the former were still capable of losing wars to the latter.
Factions
In a way, there’s a refreshing universality in AoE2, an ethos of common humanity. Beneath the different models, every faction is essentially the same (barring a special unit which is often only unlocked late in the game – the Vikings only get Berserkers after, historically, the Norse and Danes had long since settled down and ceased to Vike). It is really laudable, too, that AoE2 even before the recent DLCs had a more diverse roster of factions and cultures than most of the Total War series. This balance and symmetry is also good for playability.
It’s certainly less problematic than the approach of Rise of Nations (2004), which presented a roster of ‘Nations’ such as the British, the Japanese and the Bantu, each of which had the same essential features from the Stone Age right through to the Information Age (‘The Russians have the power of the motherland, giving them plus 3 attrition damage…’) Though I should mention that I’ve spent many enjoyable hours on Rise of Nations, including recently.
The Middle Ages saw clashes not just of class or religion or people, but of different types of society, as we can see when the Anglo-Normans confronted the Irish (check out my series Celtic Communism), or when the Norse and the Danes came to Britain.
Warfare
This brings us to the nature of warfare in the Middle Ages. Here AoE2 not only does a bad job of being historically accurate – it’s an area which I’ve always found weak in terms of gameplay.
Consider the historical battles which occur in the campaigns – the aforementioned Falkirk and Stirling, or the Battle of Hastings in the expansion pack. In real life, these were distinct battles that happened in specific places. In AoE2, they are about building a base, gradually wearing down the enemy bases, then finally destroying them. Actual battles rarely happen in AoE2. Every war is a war of attrition.
Here’s something I noticed at the moment I decided to abandon the hitherto-promising Bari campaign in one of the recent DLCs: AoE2 is supposed to be set in the Middle Ages, but actually what it simulates is closer to 20th Century warfare. In some scenarios you have limited forces and have to use them cleverly; that’s both better fun and more accurate. But in most scenarios, and in the vanilla game, your task is to churn out soldiers and rush them to the front, where each wave will gain a little ground before its complete destruction. Tactics are rudimentary.
That is why a scenario like Vinlandsaga works so well: AoE2 is better at simulating a drawn-out process of development, exploration, conquest and settlement than at simulating an individual battle. But even in Vinlandsaga, you somehow find yourself besieging and demolishing stone castles in the early Middle Ages in Greenland.
The violent part of the game is actually not much fun. Since tactics barely matter and there are no set-piece field battles, winning a war is reduced to producing soldiers in greater diversity and quantity than the enemy. You spend a fortune on them only to watch them, usually, die for minimal gains. It’s not very satisfying.
Conclusion
Like a lot of people, there are large chunks of human history that first entered my ken through the medium of videogames. This stuff is really influential on how millions of people think about the past. So there needs to be a culture of friendly historical critiques. I’ll still play a historically inaccurate but fun game over one that’s more accurate but less fun – I’ve spent a lot more time playing Creative Assembly games than Paradox games. Fair enough if developers generally allow gameplay to trump authenticity. But let’s be aware of the choices they have made.
Instead of such a culture of friendly criticism, I think strategy videogames have functioned as a transmission belt for a mechanistic and essentialist understanding of societies, nations and conflict. For example, I once came across a Youtube video which justified the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas with reference to their ‘spawn points’ and ‘tech tree’ – evidently a conscious shorthand, but un-ironic. The idea of societies composed of antagonistic classes is quite incomprehensible to people brought up to assume that each given faction or nation was a monolithic and totalitarian entity.
I’ve read more than one recent novel with a pre-modern setting in which the characters use terms like ‘subconscious’ (coined by Freud in the 1890s, right?) ‘genocide’, (coined in 1947) and ‘the military.’ It’s that last one that concerns us here. AoE2 is part of a culture that reifies the state, that tells us that the standing army and the modern nation have always existed. But the real Middle Ages were much stranger and much more interesting.
After I finished Demon Copperhead I read a couple of reviews and had a strange moment. Just for an instant, I felt surprised that this reviewer in the Guardian also knew Demon. I had approached the novel as an Award-Winning Book That People Should Read; then I started it and I was in Demon’s world, and prestigious literary awards were the last thing on my mind. When I finished it – or maybe emerged from it – a part of me was surprised to remember that it was a book after all.
Demon’s voice
The feature of the book which best explains this is there right from the start: the narrative voice.
The narrator and main character is Damon Fields, who has a nickname, like everyone on his home turf of Lee County, Virginia. He is dubbed Demon Copperhead – the echoes of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens are there if you want them, but you can enjoy this book all on its own. The book follows Demon from birth through his first two decades in this world. His community is shambling through a half-life of mass unemployment; his young single mother struggles with addiction; the opioid epidemic hits like a war when he is around 10 to 15 years old.
The great strength of this book is the gloss of humour that comes with having Demon as a narrator. When I say that it’s easy to read despite the heavy themes, maybe readers will think that means the book takes a flippant or mocking approach. But it’s compassionate and humane all the way through. When I say that Demon interrogates head-on the issue of how the media portray ‘hillbillies’ and ‘rednecks,’ you might think the narrative is weighed down with lectures. It has didactic parts, but they don’t weigh down the story at all. They drive it on. Real people lecture, and lectures can be compelling.
I don’t have personal experience of the setting or of most of the heavy themes in this book. I assume Kingsolver must know the locale and its people – it rings true. But it’s about a kid growing up at the same time as I was. From the tone of the narrative voice to the pop culture references, and even the particular flavour of juvenile humour, Barbara Kingsolver got Demon right. He seems like some kid I might have known growing up.
The literal voice of Charlie Thurston was strong in the audiobook. Again, I just can’t comment on the accuracy of the accent, but the performance was more than good enough. If I ever hear that voice on another book, or on TV, my first reaction will be, ‘Hey, that’s Demon.’
The lush landscape of Lee County, Virginia
Characters
Demon usually has at least a medium-sized list of things going on in his life, pulling him this way and that. He also has a satisfyingly large cast of characters coming and going. They are all well-developed so that I never had moments of ‘Who’s he again?’ You know you are dealing with good writing when you find yourself a little excited to see two characters together for the first time. ‘Huh,’ I said to myself, ‘so young Maggot and Swapout are doing break-ins together,’ or ‘Well, wouldn’t you know it, U-Haul and McCobb are in on the same pyramid scheme.’ On the other hand you feel genuinely relieved and pleased to see, for example, Tommy Waddles doing well in life.
In its world, ‘doing well’ is relative. When the adolescent Demon is sent to work at a dump beside a meth lab, it’s a great improvement in his fortunes because the owner of the adjacent garage lets him eat free hot dogs whenever he likes. Relief washes over you. Come to think of it, relief is the main feeling I associate with this book.
This book has great villains. It’s fair to say that U-Haul’s characterization lacks subtlety – he’s just a grotesque person. The McCobbs are a terrible foster family, in all kinds of fascinating ways, but they are not monsters. In a different and even worse foster home, Demon runs into an older boy known as Fast Forward. Fast Forward gets the younger boys to line up like soldiers for inspection each night. He shakes them down for money and snacks. He makes them take the fall for his mistakes. But he also gives them flattering nicknames, an identity, a sense of purpose and dignity in this hellhole. This is the source of his power, and that power makes him scary.
Then we have a moderate-sized pantheon of adults who just let Demon down. There’s those who, to paraphrase Demon, can’t see any more in young men like him than what can be wrung out of them by the end of the week on the battlefield, the farm field or the football field. Then there’s those who, out of misguided ‘tough love’ or in the heat of an argument, cut off support to young people just when they need them most of all. Then there’s the one who let Demon into his home, but also let in the monstrous U-Haul.
Then there are the social workers – the one who stays in the job but just doesn’t care, and the one who cares in her naïve way but quits the job as soon as she can. Demon understands why one doesn’t care, and the other quits – they get paid very poorly. Their work is a life-or-death question for him, but it is simply not valued by the state.
On the summit we have a cast of characters who are just solid gold, such as Angus/Agnes, a couple of teachers, June Peggott, and in his more limited sphere, Mr Dick.
Addiction
Kingsolver gets past the bullshit of judging addicts for their ‘personal choices’ to show why people fall into drug abuse. ‘This was done to you,’ June Peggott insists.
There is a moment early-ish in Demon Copperhead when Fast Forward throws a ‘pharm party’ for Demon and the other foster boys. They sit around on the floor eating hash brownies and taking pills. This should be an ominous moment – Demon’s first introduction to something that will later cause him a lot of suffering. But it isn’t. In this filthy and cheerless house, the boys are regarded as farm labour and nothing more. They are insulted and sometimes beaten, and not provided with clothes or proper meals. When it enters the story, the ‘pharm party’ does not present itself as something immediately dangerous. It’s a respite. The story tells us to face it: there’s nothing better on offer from their fosterer or from the Department of Social Services. Drug abuse is not the worst thing happening in this house. It doesn’t even rank in the top ten worst things.
But of course it is the beginning of something very bad. Later, when Demon is a teenager and is doing better, an injury puts him out of action and a doctor puts him on oxycontin. By now the opioid epidemic is raging. He descends into addiction – not all at once, and not putting everything else on hold. Life goes on around the addiction, but we see how it creeps in. His first experience with drugs was intimately bound up with his relationship with Fast Forward, and as he grows up relationships continue to be central to addiction. When Demon describes an incident of falling off the wagon as an act of love, and when he tells us that addiction is not for the lazy, we see what he means. We are dismayed to see him ruining his life, but his actions make sense in the situation he’s in. Sometimes his actions are even perversely admirable.
Devil’s Bathtub, in Scott County, Virginia
Dickensian
Several times, Demon descends into the depths of hell – in his lone quest to find his dad’s family; his forays to Atlanta and Richmond; and his fateful hike to the place known as Devil’s Bathtub.
But hell isn’t where Demon ends up. Plenty of other elements are in the mix: Demon’s artistic talents, plus a budding consciousness about the history of his area – the Whisky Wars, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the tension between urban and rural. As the story goes on, Demon learns how much the odds were stacked against him before he was even born. In a previous generation, his people organised in unions and took on the mining companies. Today they are cannon fodder for the drug companies. ‘This was done to you.’ These things come together organically in the final part of the novel.
Where does Charles Dickens come into it? No Dickens narrator ever talked like Demon, and I don’t think Dickens ever wrote much about sex or drugs. But like those narrators, Demon is incisive and funny, and he talks about the neglect and abuse of children, and tells stories of the lumpen adventures of orphans. He builds a world of scarcity and callousness so that the acts of generosity and friendship can stand out bright and clear. Also bright and clear is the impression that, in most essentials, nothing has changed in the intervening miles and years between David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead. The author’s decision to write the latter as a tribute to the former is not a gimmick; it carries real meaning. Capitalism means constant disorienting change but the underlying callousness stays the same, and we can recognise it in the 19th Century and in the 21st.
The questions Paul Lynch addresses in this novel are, first, ‘What if something like the Syrian Civil War happened in Ireland?’ and second, ‘What would that war mean for Eilish Stack, a mother of four living in the suburbs of Dublin?’
He is more interested in the second question than the first. But both are answered in long, consciously-crafted sentences, in uncompromising, unbroken columns of prose. Late in the story Eilish is running out her front door to search for her son when, in mid-sentence, ‘soundlessly she is raised from her feet and borne through the air rearwards with her arms held out in some counter-time of light and darkness holding pieces of cement in her mouth.’ (p 239) In other words, she was caught in the shockwave of an air strike. I like Lynch’s prose. You have to pay attention to get the full meaning from it, and it’s worth the effort.
The book opens with a scene in which two Gardaí who ‘seem to carry the feeling of the night’ knock on her door looking for her husband. He is a trade unionist, and the Gardaí are a from a new Gestapo-type unit who serve an authoritarian government. The trajectory from there to civil war and ruin is gripping, graceful and bleak.
Where are we? In Dublin, in the near future or in an alternate present. Personally, I would have liked page upon page of exposition about who this new governing party are, how they came to power, what their programme is, what their international relations are like, and so forth. I would have liked it, but that doesn’t mean it would have been a good idea. It’s not really the focus of the book. By transposing contemporary wars to a familiar setting, this book made me empathize with the victims of war. A focus on politics might have run a risk of diminishing that. An equivalent of Goldstein’s book-within-a-book from 1984would have definitely diminished it. It has been compared to 1984, but this is an easier book to like than Orwell’s, and easier to read in spite of the depth of its prose. It’s not so didactic, and it gives a more varied, optimistic and genuine panorama of the human race. But the two are not really the same type of book – Prophet Song is a description, an impression, not an attempt at anatomy or analysis.
Lynch provides enough by way of sketches to give the reader a fair idea of the political background. There is a party or coalition called the National Alliance. Their supporters wear distinctive pins on their collars, hang the tricolour from their windows, and sing the national anthem even at weddings. They make ‘hieratic gestures’ as they speak ‘the cant of the party, about an age of change and reformation, an evolution of the national spirit, of dominion leading to expansion.’ (p 71) They have been in power for two years when, one September and in response to a crisis or supposed crisis whose nature the reader is not told, they introduce an emergency powers bill.
That winter (and here the novel opens), the National Alliance government begins arresting trade unionists. The Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) are in the crosshairs and Eilish’s husband is a senior official. The union leads a protest march which is suppressed violently. In the manner of the Argentine junta, those who are arrested before and during the protest disappear, and the families receive no hint of whether they are alive or dead.
Each atrocity is given its due time and space to be felt and to have knock-on effects through the ins and outs of family life and, usually in the background, national life. We never go numb. Things escalate when Eilish’s son disappears too, though of his own volition. A shocking moment: her elderly father rings up to say that one of her boys was over at his house recently. The tall one. We are one with Eilish in her frustration. Is the confused elder mixing up yesterday’s memories with those of last year? Or was her son alive and at his grandad’s house a couple of days ago?
As I was reading Prophet Song, the Israeli state was dropping thousands of bombs on Gaza. ‘There is light now where there used to be none, the buildings folded into rubble, the solitary walls and chimney flues, the staircase that climbs to a sudden drop.’ (p 233) Not Gaza, South Dublin. To call the book prophetic, of course, would be to miss the point. It could be Gaza five years ago, or ten or fifteen ; it could be Damascus, Mosul, Aleppo, Fallujah, Khartoum, Kherson, Kharkiv.
Damage from Russian shelling in Kharkiv, 2022
I’m not sure the Irish Defence Forces have enough artillery or air power to cause such destruction; the National Alliance must have received substantial aid from abroad. Foreign military aid is usually a major factor in civil wars, though it is not mentioned here. There is mention of Canada, Australia, Britain and Europe, none of whose governments appear to be friendly with Ireland’s. But there is no mention of the United States. Maybe Ireland has been sucked into fascism in the wake of America, and Washington is sending fighter planes and artillery to Dublin.
By the way, it’s unsettling how easy it is to think of such scenarios. Ten or twenty years ago a lot of people would have been saying that a story like this was implausible but that’s not even a part of the conversation around Prophet Song.
The fact that this could be Gaza underlines how the novel, while rooted in a specific place, manages to be universal. Hence the sketched-in historical and political background. The advantage is that it invites empathy. We might some day hear the song of the prophets of the god of war in our own backyard. The disadvantage is that wars actually do have specific causes, which we need to understand. People are often tempted to attribute it all to ‘human nature’ or eternal elemental forces or whatever – which cuts across empathy.
Eilish is in fight or flight mode from the start of the novel. The run-on sentences and three-page-long paragraphs convey a sense of short breath and a hammering pulse. She is under severe pressures and barely keeping her family together. All the same, her indifference to the political situation is something I find frustrating – frustrating in the way I might find a real person frustrating. But her language adds to the impression of a narrow-minded narrator. Addicts are ‘junkies’ and people ‘from the flats’ have a ‘feral’ appearance.
[Minor spoilers in the paragraph that follows]
At one point she scolds the rebel soldiers for arresting someone who’s out after curfew. ‘My eldest son left home to fight against the regime with you lot and here I stand now on the street being threatened, we wanted the regime out but not to be replaced with more of the same.’ (p 221) Okay – that’s a rare moment of outspoken bravery there from Eilish. But if she will not consent to the rebels enforcing a curfew in a warzone, then she’s just not serious about wanting them to win. As for her son, she fought tooth and nail to try to stop him joining the rebels, so what claim has she got over them?
I think the author was trying to highlight certain uncomfortable truths about war and revolution. In Syria, many of the rebel factions turned out to be worse than the government. In any war, neither side has a monopoly on inhumane behaviour. So I understand his choices here, but I think Eilish comes across more poorly than he intended in this moment.
On the other hand, the believability of her character is not diminished by these flaws. Maybe it says something good about the rebels that Eilish feels free to defy and criticize them in a way she has never done to agents of the state.
[Spoilers over]
The characters all feel real, from the family at the heart of the story to minor incidental characters, like the clown who saves Bailey’s life or the creepy official towards the end of the book. It’s the kind of story that keeps defying expectations, even though overall you know where it’s going. For example, if I tell you that a people smuggler shows up half-way through the story, you will have a certain image in your head. But you will probably not recognize the character as such when she appears, because this novel does not deal in stock figures.
While the family waits for news of the disappeared husband and father, blows keep raining down on them. Usually, they hold up admirably. Sometimes they pay back persecution with defiance. But sometimes you can detect something breaking beyond repair, as when Eilish thinks about the baby in her arms. Like Gabor Maté, who was an infant in the Budapest Ghetto in World War Two, he will grow up to be a damaged person. But ‘out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again.’ (p 304)
My criticisms are secondary, and of a kind that are only possible with a bold, compelling and well-crafted novel. While I’m questioning a few of the choices, I’m not lamenting them. Prophet Song invites this kind of interrogation and stands up well under it.
It ends at a familiar place, familiar and dreadful to those who watched the news in 2015 and 2016. In hindsight that is where it was always going to end.
At the beginning and the end, Lynch makes it clear that the force against which Eilish is contending is not a particular party or programme, but a general ‘darkness’ which was there from the start, already containing all the horrors to come. In the final fifty pages or so, that horror reaches a climax. The reader realises how the story has filled us with dread. Because here it is, what we were dreading all along – but it’s not what we expected. It’s worse.
But ‘it is vanity to think the world will end in your lifetime’ – there is some consolation in that ‘the end of the world is always a local event.’
