Review: "Red Sky in Morning" by Paul Lynch

I predict that in a few decades, the novels of Irish writer Paul Lynch will be considered, undeniable, undisputed modern masterpieces. While they don’t pluck the right heart strings for me, his prose is simply unmatched and earns him rightly made comparisons to Daniel Woodrell and Cormac McCarthy: descriptions rich and hearty but somehow flow easily and smoothly even when they snuff out any resemblance of strong narrative clarity. And I think that is the point with his debut novel, which I just finished, Red sky in Morning and his two subsequent novels The Black Snow and Grace. These are old time tales of futility and violence, where the low down and dastardly are given, through seamless stream of consciousness passages, more eloquence and humanity than even they think they possess. A lot of the time it is at the expense of a really good and enthralling story, but the skill is simply unparalleled. The story begins near the middle of the 19^thcentury in Donegal, Ireland. Coll Coyle goes to confront the heartless landowner who is evicting his family and in a brief scuffle winds up killing him. With no choice, and with the terrifying and effective tracker John Faller only a step or two behind him, he leaves his family in the Irish countryside and hops aboard a boat to America, where he ends up working for the railroad. But Faller is not too far behind. As the book went on, each section had the unreality of an epic poem: weird character after strange encounter add up to quite an otherworldly experience that is welcome and scarily unfamiliar, whether it is the disease infested boat headed for America or a poorly lit tavern just before violence explodes. And despite the book’s tendency to over explain to the point of utter confusion, Faller casts a dark shadow over this book, and his presence, whether hanging Coll’s brother by his thumbs, forcing a drunk to dance for money or using a small child to shield himself from bullets, feels almost demonic, and is easily the most memorable item I will take away from this complex book. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Grace" by Paul Lynch

Paul Lynch’s third novel, Grace, is easily the most beautifully written novel I have read all year. Reading through it and sometimes struggling through it, I was aware of every sentence and their structure, the hard work put into them and the immense pleasure of the finished product, all of which mostly made up for some of the less engaging narrative elements, such as its meandering and vague plot and confusing characterizations that had me baffled at some points the way Cormac McCarthy always tends to baffle me. But like McCarthy, the beauty of the finished product, even if that beauty is somewhat superficially or needlessly dense, it is always something to behold. This is a very different novel than Lynch’s last one, The Black Snow, and I don’t doubt it is his best work to date. Taking place during the Irish potato famine in the mid-19^th century, this immense coming of age story focuses on Grace, a woman on the edge of adulthood, who, in the book’s first striking scene, has her hair lopped off by her mother and sent out into the world to survive on her own. With her younger brother Colly, a young boy who tells jokes without punch lines, tagging along, Grace must navigate a world pushed to the brink by hunger and madness, and along the way she meets people both menacing, helpful and somewhere in between, the most memorable being Bart, a man with a crippled hand who joins them halfway through the book, and is involved in one of the book’s most harrowing scenes involving another character, the chatterbox McNutt. Toward the end, after the book seemingly goes off the rails, Grace finds herself involved in a religious sect and finally, some semblance of home in the book’s haunting final pages. Not an easy read, nor easy to decipher, but as a work of art and labor of love, it is something I deeply admire. 
Rating: 4/5