Borders and Speculative Fiction

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is available for purchase here, at your local independent bookstore, or check out your local library. It won the Booker Prize in 2023. (Read an article by Gillian about the Booker Prize.)

Chair of the Booker Prize judges Esi Edugyan described it as "claustrophobic", while Lynch said it was "an attempt at radical empathy."

We mentioned Métis author Cherie Dimaline's novels The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Hunting by Stars (2021).

We referred to the Indian Residential School system in Canada, where Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their communities, and separated from their families, communities, and cultures in favour of a colonial "education." The 2015  Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission described this as cultural genocide. Read the Final Report and the Calls to Action on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation's website.

The westernmost point of Europe is Cape Roca, which is in Portugal.

The surge of applications for Irish citizenship after Brexit. (The Guardian)

The attempt to introduce mandatory military service in the UK under Rishi Sunak. (The Guardian)

The border-crossing powers of The Sound of Music (1965) had a lasting impact on both Gillian and Zalfa.

Refugee Council resource on the "small boats" issue exercising UK politics.

Gillian briefly channels Estelle Getty as Sophia in The Golden Girls.

The Peace Arch.

Prophet Song is about families in a time of crisis. In the real world, please consider donating to Watermelon Relief,

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the University of Leicester's School of Arts, Media and Communication for use of recording equipment; to India Downton for her invaluable expertise; and to the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali…

Gillian Roberts: …and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands, from different countries with multiple passports.

Zalfa Feghali: Hello and welcome to our very last episode of this first season of Borders Talk. We'll be talking today, oh, about a range of very fun and happy things. But first and foremost, we think we might need to issue a spoiler alert, yes? 

Gillian Roberts:That's right. 

Zalfa Feghali: Spoilers ahead, possibly, for Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, the 2023 Booker Prize winner. Shall we begin?

Gillian Roberts: Let's begin. I want to begin.

Zalfa Feghali: Go for it.

Gillian Roberts: Zalfa, why did you want us to talk about this book?

Zalfa Feghali: The question that Gillian is literally asking is why did I make her read this book?

Gillian Roberts: Wait, can I just interject and say this book is brilliant?

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, it is a fantastic book. 

Gillian Roberts: No shade on the book. 

Zalfa Feghali: No, and nor on its author. Or its many readers who both love and feel feelings as a result of reading it. Why did I want to talk about this book? I bought this book at the very end of 2023 and it sat in my office for about six months before I went on a weekend away in Wales with some friends. Hello Sarah, Sue, Dave, David. And I took this book with me thinking, not really remembering what I was taking with me and thinking yeah this will be a totally normal bank holiday weekend reading and our friends watched as I increasingly sank into a pit of despair between long walks in Wales, and effectively read it over a day and a half, thinking, I think my world is ending. And then at the very end, for the very first time, thought to myself, oh my goodness, I have something that I want to talk about on this podcast, because it is so much about borders. Our hardcore listeners, Gillian you will know of course, but our two hardcore listeners will know that I am the more reluctant podcaster of our merry duo. And so I was really pleased to finally find something that inspired me so desperately to talk about this, and I think the reason I wanted to talk about it was obviously because borders figure so literally and also figuratively throughout, but also because I feel like it is a novel that resonated with me personally because of the things that I've lived but it will resonate in different ways with every single person who reads it. Was that your experience?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Oh, I want to say a little bit more about that shortly, but I suppose we should explain for those who haven't read Prophet Song, that the premise of this novel is that the Republic of Ireland has been taken over by a totalitarian regime. And we really never find anything out about this regime or how it's come into power, what its premises are, what its ideology is. Particularly, we just know that the Republic of Ireland has been overtaken by an authoritarian regime. 

Zalfa Feghali: And it's creeping. 

Gillian Roberts: And it's creeping. Yeah, it gets, I mean, oh my God, the creep over the course of the novel. But we don't have like a sort of exposition to explain how we get there in the same way we might get from other texts, I suppose. So it is a speculative fiction, but it does resonate very powerfully I think with many contemporary events and past events as well of course. So it's a really powerful hard-hitting, and, as the Booker Prize judges said, “harrowing book” which I highly recommend everyone read when they're feeling strong.

Zalfa Feghali: And this is why I am the reluctant podcaster and Gillian is the professional podcaster.

Gillian Roberts: Let's not get carried away. I wanted to start actually by talking about borders and speculative fiction more broadly perhaps, because Zalfa read this book before I did, and then I was reading it and I was thinking, why does Zalfa want to talk about this?

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, you kept texting me and you kept saying like are the borders coming? Where are the borders? Where are the borders?

Gillian Roberts: Where are the borders? And the borders do arrive, quite emphatically so. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: Especially towards the end of the novel, but they are there both implicitly and explicitly throughout. But I wondered if there's something about the genre of speculative fiction that facilitates or encourages some engagement with borders in the work that they do or can do. What do you think?

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I think one of the strengths or features of speculative fiction is that it allows readers to notice more carefully those things which we might not pay attention to in our everyday lives. And sometimes that's borders, and sometimes that's, you know, different power relations or different institutions. And in this case, because of its setting and because of our specific positionalities, I think, and the fact that we are primed to find and see borders wherever we are, not even wherever they are, just wherever we are, it certainly lends itself to a kind of border analysis. But we have talked in the past about other speculative fiction texts where borders not just figure but are both invisible and made very visible. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: And crossing them is both an ordinary everyday event that we can recognize in our real non-speculative fiction lives, if that's a thing, while also being an important kind of textual flag, sort of, hey, pay attention to me, I, as a text, alluding to a whole history and cultural weight of what borders do and what borders have done in the past. That's, again, really vague. So, you know, we might think of Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves trilogy, which they're, you know, I'm desperate for the third. Come on. No pressure. We love to wait. Where in the first novel, borders are very much there, but not there. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: And you do know where these characters are. So again, for those of you who haven't read this fantastic currently duo of novels, Cherie Dimaline, Métis author, has written The Marrow Thieves and its sequel, Hunting by Stars, about a world in which dreaming is no longer possible for anyone except Indigenous folk, and therefore in typical fashion—

Gillian Roberts: Colonial fashion. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, colonial fashion, In North America at least, which is where the novels are set— non-Indigenous folks spend a lot of time, or settler non-Indigenous folks spend a lot of time trying to literally extract bone marrow from Indigenous people because they've decided that Indigenous people have the cure to this illness or condition. And it is a story that is part allegory of the residential school system, which we'll gloss in the show notes, but also a really brilliant piece of speculative fiction, a great piece of young adult fiction more generally, and a rumination on how borders work, I think, in the context of—

Gillian Roberts: I suppose in the context of settler-colonial crisis. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, there we are. 

Gillian Roberts: I mean, yeah, there's a really explicit moment in Hunting by Stars where this sort of group, this de facto family, they are fleeing across the Canada-U.S. border south. And of course, this contravenes every mythology about the Canada-U.S. border where everyone's going north to be free. But they're trying to cross in the other direction to flee this kind of new version of residential schools, as Zalfa said. So there's this moment where their leader, Miigwaans says, quote, “‘That isn't our border.’ Miig gestured north. ‘That's an imaginary line drawn by politicians and land prospectors. The only thing we have to worry about is who the original people are so we can honor the lands we are on’” [378] unquote. So in a way, it's a very familiar narrative of crossing a border prompted by crisis, but it's also turning that familiar crossing north from the Canada-U.S. border narrative on its head and also really emphasizing how that border in the first place is a settler-colonial construct. So that is a brilliant moment. And I think in terms of speculative fiction, which I have to say I don't read a ton of, but I think it's something to do with the state in crisis, like the liberal democratic nation-state in a moment of crisis and then suddenly borders are doing something different. So all the things that people would have previously within those states taken for granted, like the ability to cross a border freely, people with great privilege, obviously, because this isn't happening all across the world, all of a sudden that becomes more difficult or prohibited or impossible. And then I think also we really get the sense in this novel of a proliferation of borders, right? All the checkpoints that start emerging, the ways in which the city of Dublin becomes zoned and how people have to try and cross from one zone to another, the creation of a no man's land. In one city, right? So all of a sudden there are these other borders and there's curfews, so the sense of like a temporal border almost. So although I should have given Zalfa more benefit of the doubt earlier on when I was reading the novel, it does really resonate with border concerns all the way through.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, and I think on a more personal note, I think dividing a city up into checkpoints is something that I sort of take for granted having grown up in a context in which a city has been divided up into checkpoints. 

Gillian Roberts: It’s the Sharpie…

Zalfa Feghali: It is the Sharpie again, the blurry Sharpie. So I think perhaps I knew what I wanted to say without actually knowing how to say it. Nevertheless, it's a great book about borders among many other things. And, you know, one other border that the text itself crosses, for those of you who might be interested in the kind of textuality here, is that there's a lot of insight into interiority in the way that the novel is written. Lots of the reviews, I think, will frame the novel as not having any paragraph breaks, which I find... 

Gillian Roberts: It's in my notes. 

Zalfa Feghali: Is it? Yeah, I feel like not having any paragraph breaks isn't really representative of what is going on.

Gillian Roberts: No, but it is part of, and I think the reviews do pick up on this, the claustrophobia of reading this novel. There's hardly any white space on the page because these breaks aren't there, and there's no speech marks either, which I find quite a lot in Irish literature. 

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. It builds on an existing tradition, and that makes total sense.

Gillian Roberts: Exactly. But just typographically, this sense that you cannot see the forest for the trees. And I feel like that is kind of an echo of how, again, the regime is being presented. You're just in the middle of it. There's no sense of rising above it and seeing the patterns emerge.

Zalfa Feghali: That's it. The sort of interiority, exteriority, which I was failing to put across there. And I do appreciate, maybe that's not the right word, but you know, noticing that what others have called claustrophobia, I describe it as absolute urgency. I could not stop reading.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: The lack of punctuation didn't let me breathe. And then I couldn't stop reading. So it was this situation where I needed to take breaks, but you can't take breaks.

Gillian Roberts: Do you think that's why you were pacing? You told me before that you paced a lot.

Zalfa Feghali: I paced a lot. Oh my goodness, there was a lot of pacing, and it was quite annoying for the people I was hanging out with, but I was walking up and down and pacing, taking breaks, trying to take breaks rather, but carrying the book around. I did feel like sort of an 11-year-old who just, for the first time, read a big book from cover to cover and didn't want to let it go. But I very much wanted to let some of this go.

Gillian Roberts: Listeners, I urge you, if you haven't read this book already, a) you should read it, but b) don't do what I did and start reading it before bed.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh yes. 

Gillian Roberts: And if you do, you must have a palate cleanser before you try to get to sleep 

Zalfa Feghali: Well when I was rereading bits and pieces of this yesterday you texted me to say make sure you have some ice cream afterwards 

Gillian Roberts: I did, I did: just looking out for you. 

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you so much, uh yeah, ice cream is highly prescribed, yes.

Gillian Roberts: Other frozen treats are available.

Zalfa Feghali: Or non-frozen, whatever you need. Yeah, absolutely. You make your call. If you need, if you need salted snacks, then go for your salted snacks.

Gillian Roberts: I mean, personally, I would be in the camp that combines them. So I'm a big fan of the salted caramel ice cream, for instance.

Zalfa Feghali: But we digress. We need to move on. We need to move on. Otherwise, I will be ranting about salted caramel ice cream.

Gillian Roberts: I have a question for you, Zalfa. And that is, what did you make of the, I wanna say for lack of a better term, the Irishness of this book, or maybe not the Irishness of it, but maybe kind of the locatedness of this narrative in Ireland specifically versus the way in which it kind of takes on an allegorical resonance.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I can't speak to the groundedness of the place, not knowing specifically Dublin very well as other people, maybe a hardcore listener, may. 

Gillian Roberts: At least one of them. 

Zalfa Feghali: At least one. So I did spend a lot of time actually trying to map where a lot of this was taking place because of my unfamiliarity with Dublin. But I thought that the setting as Ireland was really clever, because it was such a safe, and yet very risky, but such a safe place to set it. This could never happen in this seemingly or perceived to be liberal European country that is a sanctuary for lots of people in our real life, lots of people in the UK trying to seek EU citizenship in the wake of Brexit. So, you know, we see the direction of flow going in one specific direction. It is the most... Am I wrong in this? It is the most western country in the EU. Absolutely.

Gillian Roberts: There's a bit of Portugal.

Zalfa Feghali: There is a little bit of Portugal. It seems to be the Western-most bit. That's right. The Azores, I believe.

Gillian Roberts: But I think you'd have to check that. We'll put it in the show notes.

Zalfa Feghali: My geography is embarrassing. She whispers into the microphone. Oh dear. But I did think that the choice was really clever because it renders, I mean, the exercise is to render it anywhere, but also it's very specifically Dublin, which has, as with any city, its own cleavages. The island having its own cleavages that get sort of—

Gillian Roberts: Quite famously.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, so putting it on an island, the island, not the island necessarily that you'd expect a novel about right-wing governments or authoritarian states sort of developing in. I couldn't possibly wonder what it meant in 2023, what that could be, could have been in 2023. 

Gillian Roberts: See our first episode. 

Zalfa Feghali: And second. And third. But yeah, I don't know if I know how to answer the question other than the fact that I think that's really clever, but I also feel a lot of gratitude to Paul Lynch for, you know, and he's said repeatedly in interviews that, you know, he set it in a place that he knew, even though he was thinking about Syria and was thinking about other places at the time and couldn't have anticipated, Ukraine, and couldn't have anticipated other places in the world sort of going the direction in which they've gone but needed to engage with it, and I think it was really sensitive of him to not just go and write a Syria novel or go and write a Palestinian novel or whatever but actually go with the places that, you know, Eilish goes to the butcher and the butcher ignores her and you have these amazing images which I genuinely, the imagery was so strong of him twirling the plastic bag of sausages while he, you know, and serving other customers and totally ignoring and ghosting her. I thought that was so place-specific in a way that it wouldn't have been if it was anywhere else.

Gillian Roberts: Oh, I should say that the main character at the very beginning of the novel, her husband is taken into police custody because he's heavily involved in a teacher's union.

Zalfa Feghali: And in the early sort of stages of this movement towards authoritarianism, and later we discover sort of anyone and everyone is picked up and detained in those ways.

Gillian Roberts: And then her eldest son becomes involved with the rebels as well. So they're very much a marked family in the midst of this civic crisis because of the political leanings, particularly of the men in her family, although she's no fan of the regime herself.

Zalfa Feghali: No, absolutely not. But it's also worth kind of framing that as part of a set of social structures in which everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone's business. And that isn't to say that's specifically Irish. That certainly happens on my street all the time. 

Gillian Roberts: You have a very particular street. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, that's true. We do live in a commune. I mean, cult. I mean, commune. But it is something that is very recognizable in, a) the conventions of speculative fiction, but b) in Irish fiction as well.

Gillian Roberts: So I went on a real journey with this book, not just in terms of, Zalfa, why are you making me read this? What does it have to do with borders? 

Zalfa Feghali: We didn't talk for months. That's obviously not true, we've been recording episodes.

Gillian Roberts: But I was really irritated at a certain period in this book where, and this is where she's trying to get her eldest son to get across to Northern Ireland so he can continue going to school at a point where mandatory military service has come in. See also Rishi Sunak. Anyway, but, and I was feeling at that point, I thought, well, this is a bit messed up, this idea that this crisis is happening in Ireland. And what do you need to do? You need to cross the border to the side of the colonial oppressor, historically, and then everything's going to be fine, right? So this is what was going through my mind at that point. But then that's really not what happens in this book, in the slightest. But for a long time, it's like, oh, if you can just get across the border, if you can just get to the UK, then problems will be solved. So I think what's really interesting is that's held out as a real beacon of hope at a particular point of the novel. But then, and here's a big spoiler, when some members of the family do do that journey to cross over, it's not portrayed like that at all, is it? I mean, it's a really horrific experience. It isn't a lovely embrace of open arms. 

Zalfa Feghali: No. 

Gillian Roberts: At all. And all of the power plays that go on in these, that can go on in these locations and the corruption and the hostility and the vast sums of money that are required to get them across the border from, you know, externally, because the main character's sister, Áine, lives in Toronto and has been trying to get them out, and she's got this great line that I have to read, where she says, quote, this is the sister of Eilish, “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave” [103]. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, this idea of a silent record is fantastic.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, yeah. And various people have been, you know, people who we’re not really attached to in the novel, they're just, you know, people who know people who know people who have been getting out, they've been going to Canada, US, Australia, England is mentioned repeatedly. And it's only towards the end when so many devastating things have happened to most of the men in her family that she leaves with her baby boy and her teenage daughter. Yeah. And they're crossing into Northern Ireland. But that whole experience, I just kept feeling like, oh, if they can just get there, if they can just get there, it's going to be okay. And there's this incredible build throughout the novel where you think, oh, if she can just get to the hospital and oh my god, that whole sequence is just devastating. But if they can just get there, 

Zalfa Feghali: if they can just get past this sniper fire, if they can just get past that—

Gillian Roberts: Then it's going to be fine. And it just gets worse and worse and worse. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I mean, It is worth just ribbing you a little bit here as a border studies person. Why did you think that if they could just get over the border?

Gillian Roberts: Well, I know, right? And then I realized because of The Sound of Music.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, right. Because. Oh, that's so interesting. I did not, like that, I think of all the things I expect you to say that was not anywhere near the list I mean that was on a wow 

Gillian Roberts: I know, right? I was thinking about this, I was thinking about this exact question yesterday like what narrative did you think you were reading and why, and then I realized, I'm sorry, Mom, but when I was a child there was one summer where I watched The Sound of Music daily on VHS, and I think she, she might have thrown the tape out after a while, but um, but I was obsessed with that film, and I was obsessed with this idea like well what, what do you do to escape a totalitarian regime, you cross the border, right, you walk over to Switzerland singing, and this is how everything is made fine, and it took me a long time later in life to realize that Switzerland's neutrality was like maybe a bit problematic…

Zalfa Feghali: And also those those mountains were sort of suspiciously snow-free. 

Gillian Roberts: Well, yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: You know then that's and that's just neither here there we we have we're just going to go on a digression folks: we just have discovered something else that we had in common that we literally just learned now. As a very young child, I apparently refused to eat unless The Sound of Music was playing on the television. And the VHS that my parents still have says on the label, Zalfa's video: The Sound of Music. 

Gillian Roberts: Zalfa’s dinner. 

Zalfa Feghali: Zalfa’s dinner. And apparently, I was a very happy eater, but I needed to be watching The Sound of Music. So that is that. 

Gillian Roberts: I mean, the hills are alive. 

Zalfa Feghali: The hills, something was alive. That is fascinating. That's so interesting, because as I was reading this, you know, when they were put in the truck and they were kept in the container, yeah, and then they were put in the flat, and they were just detained and ripped off and the rules kept changing and the price kept changing at every juncture all I could do was think of parallels of cultural texts about the US-Mexico border crossing, because that is exactly the sort of thing that you see as a trope repeated, because that's what happens in real life.

Gillian Roberts: I should just clarify that by that point in the novel I knew that I wasn't readingThe Sound of Music.

Zalfa Feghali: You'd worked it out, unbelievably. Unbelievably. 

Gillian Roberts: Something twigged.

Zalfa Feghali: Slow but sure. 

Gillian Roberts: But then I also had another like wobble moment with the Ireland/not Ireland, where I was like, well, they're on the other side now. Now they can just get on a plane. Like, they can just get on a plane, they can just fly, and then they can get to Canada, and that'll be fine, right? 

Zalfa Feghali: No, no, no, no, no…

Gillian Roberts: No, no, no, no, no, no, grasshopper, no…

Zalfa Feghali: Oh you sweet summer child

Gillian Roberts: Yeah exactly. Because then boats. And I was like why? And then I thought oh, of course, it’s got to be about boats. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: Because everything in this country, everything in the UK, is about boats, both politically, and in terms of the discourse. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I mean, I think to end at the point where Eilish is about to, you know, she's gone on the boat, she can't put a life jacket on because she's holding, she's got Ben, the youngest child strapped to her. So she gets on the boat and Molly says, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this. And, you know, Molly has been the person across the novel and, you know, so have other characters who are watching and listening to foreign, illegally I should say, to foreign news broadcasts and Eilish is just sort of keeping them all alive in a different way. And she repeats, and again another spoiler folks, that I think the last lines of the novel are this, “the sea is life,”  the sea is life. 

Gillian Roberts: Quote, “we must go to the sea, the sea is life” [309]. 

Zalfa Feghali: There are so many intertextual allusions already, but the idea that the sea is life in the context when we are reading about quote-unquote small boat crossings. 

Gillian Roberts: And they're inflatables, these ones in the novel. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, exactly. And the danger of them and then the fact that you see them getting on these boats make it, well, a previous scene makes sense because the dude getting them across says, you're only allowed one plastic bag each. And you think, why? Why are you only allowed one plastic bag each? And then you realize, oh, I get it. I get it now. So it's, I mean, I feel like “harrowing” for this novel is “unprecedented” for the pandemic, right? We don't, we're going to overuse it. It isn't enough to convey how harrowing it really is. I just thought, I thought another word was going to come to me. 

Gillian Roberts: We need to turn it up to 11 on the harrowing dial.

Zalfa Feghali: But it's devastating, but it's totally brilliant. And it's the sort of literature that the Booker Prize prizes, and you might want to move on to think about the Booker Prize now, if you want, because it is prescient, it is about now. But it's also about everything that has passed as well.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. I think this book also asks that really key question at this point in our history of which narratives are privileged, which refugee narratives are privileged, which refugees are privileged as in need of saving by Western governments. And it does that without making it clunky. You know, you find yourself, like, is there more urgency reading this text if you are a reader in a Western liberal democratic nation-state, possibly living across the water from Ireland, possibly with Irish family connections? And you're thinking, oh my God, just get them out, just get them out. But we should, of course, have that response to any refugee narrative, right?

Zalfa Feghali: Sure, and I mean, I think that's why setting the novel in Ireland is so clever because, I mean, I think Lynch himself has described the novel as an exercise, I think I read this in an interview, an exercise in radical empathy. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: And I respect that and I think in important ways that's quite right. I've always struggled with the idea of kind of “radical” empathy because empathy is empathy. The fact that we have to mobilize a radicalization is kind of a test, is a commentary. Yeah, well, it's a commentary on Western society, I suppose. And so in that sense, radicalizing, that sort of radicalization makes all the sense in the world. But the very idea that there is a hierarchy maybe of what empathy we are happy to allocate or apportion to group A, group B or group C in descending order is a thing that we need to, you know, is even a thing that we need to enumerate. I mean, we've talked at length over the course of this last season about small boats, about ideological kind of red flags, dog whistles actually is what I'm trying to say. And that this novel ends with a small boat crossing. We don't know if it's going to be successful. Lots of people read this and they go, oh, it's hopeful. And I thought, were you just reading the same book? OK, and maybe that...

Gillian Roberts: Did they watch The Sound of Music too many times? I mean…

Zalfa Feghali: It probably says more about me than other people, but I did not feel hope at the end of this book. I didn't even feel despair.

Gillian Roberts: That's really interesting. I'm trying to remember. I think I felt like because I knew that I had assumed things would get easier because repeatedly they're told that, right? Like Áine is saying throughout the novel, like you need to get out, and she gets her dad out, or so we're told. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, we're under the impression. 

Gillian Roberts: But nobody says anything about the dog, which is a bit of a source of anxiety for me. What happens to his dog? But then all of the different stages of their crossing the border and how difficult and complicated they are. It's like, okay, so yeah, what is it going to be like? What is the UK government's position? We don't even know because we know that people are trying desperately to listen to the BBC in Ireland to get the quote-unquote “real news” because they’re censoring.

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. And that there are ceasefire talks going on. 

Gillian Roberts: That's right. 

Zalfa Feghali: And that they're trying to come to a deal. There is a temporary ceasefire about midway through the novel as well, or maybe even further in. But what's really interesting is that, because this is Eilish's interiority that is foregrounded in the novel, it is very much insular. And it's insular in the way that you do experience in this sort of communications blackout. But even if it's not a blackout, in the sort of survival prioritization, you don't sit and think, oh, I want to hear about what other people have to say about our situation. That is something that I imagine you do, but you probably need to get food for your kids as Eilish is trying to do throughout and take care of her father and so on. So it's interesting that you only get a sense of where she is rather than anywhere else. And that matters because the rest of the world's bullshit opinions then don't matter. Even while they matter desperately, you know, they matter a lot. It matters that, you know, we want to know what will happen if they do make it across the Irish Sea. But we kind of already know what's going to happen. We don't need world opinion. And world opinion will be loads of, surely it will be loads of, “I condemn this,” and “We urge this.”

Gillian Roberts: Thoughts and prayers.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, exactly.

Gillian Roberts: And we also know that if they've got out, loads of other people haven't got out. And also, like, you know, half of her family is unaccounted for or accounted for in ways that are very devastating. 

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. 

Gillian Roberts: I can't now recollect whether I felt hopeful but, you know, the fact that it ends at the sea, at yet another border, should give one pause, I suppose.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, a very pausable moment.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, a very pausable moment. And does that mean we want to press pause now on Prophet Song? 

Zalfa Feghali: Let's press pause. Tell us about, perhaps, a border you have known.

Gillian Roberts: Well, funny you should ask. I want to tell a story of crossing the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which I've been saving up, and now seems like a good time to tell this story. Picture it: 2004. 

Zalfa Feghali: Whoa. 

Gillian Roberts: Just going full Golden Girls here. 2004, I finished my PhD at the University of Leeds. My parents come over for what seems to be the coldest summer ever in the UK and they won't come back for like more than a decade after that because they're so traumatized. But anyway, they come over for my PhD graduation. 

Zalfa Feghali: She's not bitter. 

Gillian Roberts: I'm not bitter. And they travel around and then they go to Northern Ireland. And I meet them there, or I think I maybe meet them in the Glasgow airport, and we go over to Northern Ireland, and a couple of my aunts and one of my cousins come from Canada, and we all stay in this house. My parents did this house swap with another family in Northern Ireland, so that family had my parents' house, and we had their house, and their car, et cetera, et cetera. So we were in Portrush for a holiday. Now, one thing about Canadians is they live in a very large country, And they're used to driving very large distances in one go without really thinking very much of it. And indeed, one of my aunts who was on that trip at the time lived in, you know, northern BC. And if we were visiting them or they were visiting us, it'd be like, you know, 10 hours of driving plus a ferry, et cetera. So there we are on the northern coast of Northern Ireland in Portrush. And then we have this idea. Let's drive down to the south. Let's go check out Republic of Ireland. So I'm like, OK, great. And I'm like, OK, people, remember, this is a different country. We've got to have identification. We've got to have our passports. You know, the currency is going to be different. We have to take this seriously. 

Zalfa Feghali: I kind of want to tell you to calm down. 

Gillian Roberts: Just you wait. So and we're travelling in two cars as well because there are so many of us. And I'm like, OK, OK. And I'm looking at the map because this is, we don't have Google Maps on our phones. I don't even have a mobile phone at this point. So it's, you know, we do have to do a certain amount of planning and we're crossing the border at Strabane. And I'm used to crossing the Canada-US border on the west coast of Canada, you know, the Peace Arch, right? Like massive monuments and queues like you wouldn't believe. 

Zalfa Feghali: A notable experience. 

Gillian Roberts: A notable experience. And I'm looking at the map and I'm looking around and here we are on Strabane and I'm going, where's the border? Where's the border? Where's the border? Where's the border? And we go over this teeny tiny little bridge and on the other side of the bridge all the prices on the signs are in Euros— 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: —and there's some Irish-language signage, and I'm like oh we just crossed the border so I felt like a right fool having been very much on high alert about crossing the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which you know I might have had to have been at an earlier stage but certainly not by that point. So that is a border that I have known, but not as well as I thought I did.

Zalfa Feghali: You barely knew it. A border you think you noticed.

Gillian Roberts: And then, hilariously, when I left, so we drove quite far down in Irish terms. I think I scandalized an Irish friend when I said how far—we drove to Adare that day, who was like, what, in a day? Like, Canadians. And then we were traveling all around the Republic of Ireland, and then I flew home to Leeds from Dublin. And so when I arrived in [Leeds], and of course there's like a Common Travel Area agreement between Ireland and the UK. Yeah. And yes, this is 2004. And at that time I only had a Canadian passport. It's like, to say it's semi-staffed… the immigration on a flight from Ireland would would be to overstate how much it was staffed. And I was just walking really slowly thinking, surely something's got to happen here. And I had my Canadian passport in my hand. And a staff member kind of says, Oh, oh, oh, hmm. Like, they didn't even know what to do with someone who had something other than a UK passport or an Irish passport, because it was like, Oh, we've got to deal with this now? I mean, it was fine, but it was quite comic in how they just didn't really know how to compute the fact that I was there with something else. So, yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: Another one of your travels.

Gillian Roberts: Another one of my travels. There we have it. Well, Zalfa, that's the end of season one.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, Gillian, here we are. Here we are together again.

Gillian Roberts: So, we hope to “see you” is kind of the wrong word.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I guess thank you all, first of all. Especially to our hardcore listeners.

Gillian Roberts: For all the listening. And hopefully we'll have something for you to listen to in something called Season 2.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.