Zara Murao picks her favourite reads of 2024
A novel set in the near future and a work of non fiction set in Palestine both read like they are straight out of a dystopian nightmare
The similarities are startling. So, of course, are the two stories: A boy is injured. A parent is desperate to reach him. They don’t know if their child is alive or dead. They will not know for hours. There are road blocks and armed guards in the way; as well as restricted access for certain kinds of citizens.
In scenes straight out of a dystopian nightmare, a mother (in one case) and a father (in the other) begs neighbours with the right colour of pass to help. Risks bullets to make it to hospital after hospital.The desperate journey seeps off the pages and onto one’s skin.These families will never be the same again.
One of these tales forms part of the dystopian work of fiction, Prophet Song, written by Paul Lynch (2023) and set in a near-future Ireland ruled by a division of the secret police.
The other is the true story of a Palestinian in Jerusalem. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023), written by Nathan Thrall, an American Jew living in Jerusalem, tells the story of Salama and his five-year-old son Milad, who died in 2012. Reported with devastating simplicity, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction this year. But I recommend reading the Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song first. Because without its lingering sense of horror, what is Salama’s story but the stuff of daily headlines?
The horror of death, torture and families torn apart in Ireland has the unmooring effect of tumbling into a fresh warren abutting the world of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Lynch’s novel rips the veil away from how little it really takes to normalise brutality.
It offers no let-up, no easy exits, no hope.
One finds oneself casting about in one’s own reality for proof that this could never happen.
But if it is happening, in Gaza, in Kyiv, in Kashmir, in Kabul… and in new ways, in newer places… What one is really looking at only sideways are the questions: This couldn’t happen where I am, could it? Couldn’t happen where my children live?
And… what does one make of the obvious answer?
The two books, read together, create a vital disturbance in a carefully calibrated view of the world, calling to mind one of the most haunting lines in The Handmaid’s Tale: “How were we to know even then that we were happy?”
The line occurs early on… after the first new rules kick in; after women begin to be separated from their assets, and children from their parents.
“How were we to know even then that we were happy?” We have an ability as a species to retain a vast degree of personal equilibrium amid communal chaos. We use it all the time.
At what point does it cross over, then, from asset to liability?
