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Skippy Dies was one of the best books I'd ever read when I first came across it. I was in many ways primed for it; Murray had clearly read Pynchon and David Foster Wallace but he fused the ambivalent system-building and 50-odd characters with a very deeply felt humanism. It was sentimental slop for crybabys, basically, I loved it and I can still quote quite a few lines from it from memory. A funny sidebar is that Murray obviously read a Kevin Myers article about how the independent Irish state, out of its commiments to anti-imperialist politics, silenced, erased and ignored the young men who fought and died for the British Empire at the Somme and reproduces it uncritically; Skippy Dies is set in Blackrock College and this is one of the oversights that come with this terrain.

I was put off his follow-up, The Mark and the Void, because I heard him say in the press that his intention was to humanise bankers and other people who work in the financial sector; after the 2008 recession I had no interest in seeing these people represented as human beings because that is exactly what they are not.

I picked this up on an impulse and burned through the first two sections, everything that made Skippy Dies was here, the sadness, the search for meaning, the loneliness, the humour, even if a handful of the similes were slack or redundant.

Whenever a good novel switches point of view from a character I've come to enjoy I always feel a slight inward resistance. I felt it the first time this happened here but I realised very quickly I was in good hands and was as sold on this new point of view as I was on the first. When I shifted onto someone else for the second time I was ready to go wherever I was being taken, but it didn't come off.

What was notable about this sudden collapse in credibility was that it set in when Murray, for the first time in his career, is trying his hand at conventional Irish naturalism; we see a character growing up in a rural homestead ridden with angst, anger, repression, Catholicism and a certain residual Pagan mysticism. It just does not work and the credibility problem is exacerbated further by a completely unconvincing home invasion.

This is all intended to give us an insight into the childhood of a character who up until that point has been a The Wife, in the worst sense. All that she has been doing is complaining, screaming at other characters, worrying about social appearances, buying shoes. This flashback was supposed to give us the reason why this woman is like this, but ultimately it's not breaking out of women be shopping territory. I know this is not science-fiction, families and people like this exist, husbands hit a roadblock in their life and offload responsibility for the household to their wives who are ground to powder under the pressure but given Murray's capacity to show processes like this unfolding far more convincingly elsewhere it just does not work in the context of what this novel is trying to be, i.e. a Franzen-y multi-generational emotional history of a family with Wodehouseian characteristics.

I would be inclined to say that what's happening here is that Murray is at his best representing teenagers or manchildren from Dublin experiencing ennui, rather than a milieu dominated by adults and a world of real-life consequences or suffering outside of the M50, but I think this is just a matter of execution. The kind of book that makes me wish some authors were in the habit of re-drafting something they've already put out, decide 'that fat and ugly mother who ruins everyone's attachment style is a bit pat, let's change that up'.

the good plot and writing puts it up into the upper percentile of genre fiction off the bat. I hope one day to know enough about Thai culture and history to see specifically what Bacigalupi got wrong about it here.

one piece of criticism that was sent my way (by someone who is probably reading this, and I do thank them for it) made the, I think the slightly yank-centric point, that it emphasised ethnic and religious tensions within Asia (between Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, Japanese and Chinese) and that this came at the expense of a focus on white supremacy (which is not to suggest that this is absent, every non-white character refers to white people as devils). I personally found the representation of periodic programs of ethnic cleansing to the work to be quite convincingly done and, alongside the treatment of opportunistic disease, convey a persuasive account of a world in climate meltdown, at according to the standards I expect from science-fiction novels.

there is a character in this who is sexually degraded and humiliated basically every time she's on the page. it is of course possible to represent the bleaker aspects of human existence but there isn't a great case for it made here, some people will find it too much

put together a load of notes on this really great study for anyone who might find them useful aonchiallach.github.io/posts/smith_notes/

in overall terms Imperialism in the twenty-first century makes a very convincing argument for i) imperialism as a fundamental component of contemporary capitalism, ii) the necessity of incorporating a Marxist reading of economic literature pertaining to underdevelopment and iii) the provincialism of Euro-Marxists (read: British Trots in the SWP).

Smith's central argument is that the bourgeoisie in the imperial core have begun to reap 'super-profits' by outsourcing large parts of the productive process to ultra low-wage economies such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya and paying workers below the socially necessary rate, which would allow them to maintain their own conditions of existence. The parts of the text that describe the conditions in which millions of people now live and work is harrowing in the extreme. There is an enormous amount of statistics here and serious unpacking of concepts drawn from all three volumes of Capital, which were not as fresh in my mind as I would like, but Smith is highly readable and always has two to three paragraphs summing things up for slower readers. It's a really refreshing and welcome approach for someone who really knows their Marx to take.

Smith's critics have attempted to paint him as a third-worldist or Stalinist recommending variously, cross-class collaboration in the imperial core or 'there is no such thing as a worker in the west'-type positions. This sadly confirms much of his objections to contemporary trends on the organised / academic left which seems largely uninterested in re-evaluating old models in light of new evidence or historical development. At no stage does Smith moralise about the western working class and his criticisms of the failures of the USSR and China to establish a firm and consistent line on national liberation struggles, to see beyond their own short to medium term diplomatic objectives with western powers, are proportionate and accurate. The Cuban revolution, with its impeccable internationalist objectives is the hero of the work, though the broader point is the sketching out of a model that explains why the labour movements in Europe and the United States have never meaningfully opposed their own ruling class on behalf of those in the global south. Any explanation for why the twentieth century took the course it did needs to reckon with that and of course, a particular type of doctrinaire Trotskyist does not. In a bid to better understand some of the material I ran my own analyses on updated datasets and found Smith's empirical basis for arguing that while worker power is being eroded on a global basis rates of exploitation are rising slower within the west, remained robust.

The book is not only worth reading for all the reasons that I've set out here, but I think it's also extremely worthwhile as a reference text. At some length Smith lays out the problems involved with currently existing datasets which purport to represent levels of value-add in manufacturing or wage rates, given their being collected on the basis of neoclassical economic assumptions and how much economic activity simply remains uncaptured, precisely because of the depths of the inequality these trends have brought about. There is also really great evaluations of the works of other Marxists; massive gaps or obfuscations are identified in the works of figures such as David Harvey, Ellen Mieksins Wood, Robert Brenner and Samir Amin. If every book elaborating on Marxist theory was this good we'd be sorted