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language: English
country: Ireland
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): horror, fantasy
dates read: 12.7.23
Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin’s Wax and Wane is a deeply fucked-up story about far-right radicalization, Volkish nationalism, a marriage collapsing under the weight of these, and — more broadly — the social and political tensions within Irish nationalism in the twenty-first century, told from the back-and-forth perspectives of Cormac, an unemployed man drawn into an Irish nationalist (oc)cult, and his wife Ailbhe, struggling to process the rapid changes — ideological and eventually physical — in her husband as he gets more and more involved with the “Mic Tíre” (lit. “the Wolves”).
my only critique is that some of Cormac’s POV felt a little on the nose or artificial in the first few chapters but other than that. oof. what a book! it’s a really sharp exploration of the tensions between the cultural and ethnic nationalism of early anticolonial and postcolonial rhetoric — which is still in some ways at the heart of “Irishness” — and the broader civic nationalism of the Irish state since the Celtic Tiger period and the advent of large-scale immigration. who does — or should — Ireland “belong” to? in answer to this question, Wax and Wane is an absolute rejection of ethnonationalism and its appeals to “the folk”, to “tradition”, and to “traditional values”: down this road lies the both figurative and literal monstrosity that Cormac becomes, abusive, violent, and ultimately physically monstrous.
part of me wishes it had offered an alternative, but it’s not that kind of book; it is, after all, a horror novel. I suppose another possible critique might be that in linking Cormac’s radicalization to the literally-monstrous it risks reifying a “normal” status quo (read: a generic liberal consensus) and presenting the Mic Tíre’s nationalism as something absolutely outside the norm, but I think the liminal figure of the (were)wolf circumvents this insofar as the monstrous both a transformation of the human and, nonetheless, in continuity with it — Cormac’s physical transformation is a speculative literalization of his ideological transformation.
it’s extremely dark, but if you’re up for something very dark…
moods: dark, grimy, polemic, tense