Red Sky in Morning by Paul Lynch
My rating: 4/5 cats
“People aren’t people. They are animals, brutes, blind and stupid following endless needs they know not of what origin. And all the rest that we place on top to make us feel better is a delusion. The price of life is the burden of your own weight and some people are better off without it.”
this is one of those books that is just STEWING in its own systems and standards of justice, where you are left at the end thinking – “woah, harsh.” it is like george r.r. martin gleefully rubbing his hands together with “you have made bad choices, characters!” cormac mccarthy saying “life is hard, sorry!,” the whole old testament of the bible musing “these punishments seem arbitrary, right?,” thomas hardy chortling, “one mistake, and it will haunt you forever, suckas!!”
this is brutal stuff.
the short version of this is: man accidentally kills another man in ireland, and is forced to go on the run while the father of the deceased hunts him down across the ocean with an unquenchable thirst for revenge and preternatural tracking skills. along the way: much death.
the long version is more complicated.
for a first novel, this is a remarkable achievement. it lacks the economy of prose that someone like woodrell or mccarthy would employ in a similarly typical western-genre storyline about the lone man on the run from lone(ish) man across a dangerous landscape, but if there’s one thing i have learned about the irish: they do tend to go on… it’s not purple or anything, but it does take pleasure in its language. and that’s a good thing; it’s just less-usual for this kind of story, which is usually very stark and spare in its prose.
but i loved it. it got me every single time the distance between these two characters lessened with its perfectly-deployed tension and even though i asked myself several times “isn’t the world a big place?? how does he keep FINDING him???” it never felt contrived, and the narrow escapes were completely realistic and none of that deus ex machina shit.
it’s a short book with a high body count, and while it’s a little cruel in its determination of who is “better off without” the burden of the weight of their lives, it is never ever boring.
a must-read for you grit-lit kids.
