There has been a surge in Irish dystopian fiction over the past decade or so, ranging from Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane to Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Alive, not to mention Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song. While some dystopian novels veer towards fantasy, the most longevous examples use the future to reflect current politics. Ironically, they can be more contemporary than contemporary fiction. The zeitgeist is for novels to be prescient, so what can this writing reveal about Ireland?
In recent years our primary fears have tilted from climate disaster, as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, to global war. My debut novel, The Memorisers, imagines Russia unleashing nuclear missiles in 2025, due to an escalation in its war with Ukraine. It is also within the realms of plausibility that, given the situation in Taiwan, China could combine forces with Russia and invade Europe in order to break western hegemony.
One question looms large above others in Irish politics: what are the prospects of a united Ireland? I address it in The Memorisers by opening the action in Western Front West, a country comprised of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It wasn’t a political decision on my part to create a united Ireland, which some will think of as a utopia. It simply made military sense.
A dystopian world has to have its own internal logic. Some writers create worlds to be as vague as possible, but I much prefer the template of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which society’s rules are explained in detail. If we look at Irish life nowadays, our communication is dominated by phones and social media. It’s commonly believed that our future will become more digitalised, but it’s equally possible that nuclear war would allow a complete reset: we can see from Donald Trump’s administration how quickly laws can be overturned. I decided to present an Ireland where books and personal computers are banned and the only information fed to people is disseminated from a media centre, the TruthHub.
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Dystopias are not so much invented as formed by a series of educated guesses. While I wholeheartedly support Ukraine, I don’t support the West’s pro-Ukraine propaganda, which paints a false picture. It’s not only this propaganda that led me to envisage Western Front West having an autocratic government; it’s also the West’s cruel cancel culture perpetrated on writers by powerful institutions. The playwright Caryll Churchill, for instance, had her European Drama Award cancelled by Schauspiel Stuttgart because of her pro-Palestinian stance, but there are copious other examples of artists and writers being punished for their views. In 2024 the UK government denied the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap funding because of their punkish anti-British lyrics.
UK residents such as myself have become increasingly concerned by non-criminal hate incidents where people can be arrested over a tweet that is considered inflammatory. My reimagining of hate crime is WordCrime, just as Orwell envisioned thoughtcrime. Fortunately, the Irish Minister for Justice dropped plans last autumn to introduce similar hate-speech laws, but Ireland has its own injustices. There is understandable anger at the ruling class’s failure to address the lack of affordable housing.
While Lynch was influenced in Prophet Song by the refugee crisis sparked by the Syrian war, his propulsive Dublin-set novel is also fuelled by a rise in the far right throughout Europe, as well as by Ireland’s anti-immigration riots. My own vision is heavily impacted by my five visits to Ukraine between 2022 and 2024 to witness the war. Although it may look as if I’m projecting bravery through my Ukraine trips, I was actually cowering under my duvet every time I heard an explosion. It is frightening to see a European country under attack, although the Irish at least have an insight into warfare through our former ethno-religious conflict.
The surreal predominates in Ukraine. I’ve seen for myself how people’s lives are tightly controlled through curfews, identity checks and the closure of entertainment venues. In terms of Irish entertainment, the pub is an integral part of our culture, but in The Memorisers pubs have been closed down in a government attempt to atomise communities. In Ireland the culture of churchgoing has been greatly diminished by secular politics, so isn’t it possible that our pub culture could be eroded? And could religion stage a revival during a future war or will churches simply be converted into aid hubs? The permutations are vast.
Collective memory is hugely important for modern Irish society. The obsession with the past isn’t surprising, considering our divided island. History, however, is suppressed in both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Similarly, in The Memorisers, tribal histories within Ireland are viewed as a threat to social cohesion by Western Front West’s repressive government. Western Front West wants its citizens to concentrate on the immediate reality of war, but the past keeps seeping out, just as the Troubles permeate contemporary Belfast through the old murals and commemoration sites.
The past in Ireland is often repackaged: ancient ringforts are turned into tourist sites. Bearing this in mind, it’s likely that the Eleventh of July bonfires will eventually exist as a symbol of renewal, returning to their midsummer roots in a complete divorce from Protestant culture. In the absence of Irish history, isn’t one of the most wonderful benefits that there will be no more sectarianism? Isn’t that a utopia? In the world I’ve conjured up, there are different manifestations of the collective memory. Non-compliant citizens are disappeared in a nod to the Disappeared of the Troubles, the police wear black-and-tan uniforms, and dialect resurfaces along with long-forgotten names.
One fascinating aspect of dystopian fiction is the way it examines the psychogeography of a landscape. A nation’s ethos is reflected through its public buildings. In The Memorisers the bombed-out Linen Hall Library, with its history of enlightenment, is a touchstone of liberty. We northerners have also been more psychologically shaped by language control than the southern Irish. One obvious example is the way in which languages are used to divide us: nationalist politicians promote the Irish language and unionists promote Ulster-Scots. It’s an underacknowledged fact that democratic governments find free speech almost as dangerous as their totalitarian counterparts, as it provides a portal into alternative, often contentious ideas. One controversial topic has been the usage of gender-neutral personal pronouns, but in Western Front West pronouns have been repurposed by the Grand Commander, who uses They/Them in order to be all things to all people.
It would be easy to think of war, climate change and social media as the main preoccupations of our times. One potentially bigger dystopia involves the perils of AI. At the moment, artificial intelligence is an encyclopaedic writing machine that can’t create artistically original work, but it will be interesting to see if it can evolve and transform Irish society.
Orwell said that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a satire. He was lampooning communism in particular, but dystopian fiction tends to warn us of our own government’s interference in our lives. The aversion therapy in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was, for instance, based on real proposals to experiment on prisoners. For politically engaged writers it’s clear that the best vehicle for humanising repression is the dystopian novel. If there is one thing I can predict with confidence in our troubled times, it is that the appetite for dystopias will only increase.
The Memorisers is published by Arlen House
