John Banville: Please Stop

 John Banville who won the Booker prize before it became a demographic award doesn’t like the ‘woke’ folk.  O.K. fine, splendid but he had to assure the potential audience for his new book; one of those written by his Benjamin Black alter ego, that he was not a troglodyte or worse - an old white man.  (It’s bad detective fiction.  I read one of them and there was a series on television.  They are not very good.)

In any case they are set in the ‘50‘s in Dublin and contain all the cliches about that era.  Archbishop McQuaid - wicked old prelate, priest ridden Ireland, mother and baby homes etc, etc.  Banville deplores them without the craw thumping of false regret which is one feature he shares with the ‘woke’.  We all of us in this new dawn are cut off from our history and on its right side which is the left side.

An article written by him in the Irish Times, he was literary editor there once, runs along that deep rutted track.  In  the comments section below someone (Patrick60) wrote a rejoinder which ‘needed to be said:

banville criticised

“Here we go again ... Ireland and the Catholic Church in the 1950s. Could we for a moment lift our eyes from Ireland's supposedly unique, priest-ridden backwardness in this period to consider what was happening in other countries? Many of our EU friends were busy fighting vicious colonial wars, involving in all cases horrific atrocities. This included France (Tunisia, Algeria), the UK (Cyprus, Kenya), the Netherlands (Indonesia late-40s) and Belgium (the Congo 1960). Racial oppression and violence were rife (egregiously so in the US and South Africa but far wider than that). Eugenics still had a strong following, nowhere more so than in Sweden which pursued enforced sterilisation for the "mentally defective" up to 1976 and required it for gender re-assignment surgery until 2012. (Yes you read that correctly.) Unmarried motherhood had the same stigma everywhere and every country had their equivalent of mother and baby homes. It was not a peculiarly Irish or Catholic thing. Nor was homosexuality viewed differently in Ireland to other countries in the 1950s. And all this is before we talk about the Eastern bloc countries for which the Irish left - including prominent elder statesmen of the left - had such a soft spot, fully aware of the nature of these regimes. Other countries seem to be able to confront their history with some measure of perspective and context. We prefer to wallow in it. The 1950s began 60 years ago. Give it a rest, John.”