Suzanne Harrington: Once we smuggled condoms over the border...soon it will be Sally Rooney novels
Rooney’s publishers have withdrawn her books from UK distribution, but sales of her books have increased by more than 330%.
At a lit-fest in London, the conversation pivots from the riches of migration and multiculturalism (as author Rebecca Solnit writes, “If you like food, you like immigrants”) to a current hot potato of idiotic villainy — book banning.
How the insane concept of banned books is creeping from the maddest MAGA states to polite British bookshops, thanks to Sally Rooney’s support for Palestine Action, the grassroots organisation whose supporters — including many elderly people holding up hand-written signs in public places saying ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’ — are being arrested as terrorists.
You’ll have seen media images of them being carted off by police, with their walking sticks and zimmer frames. Since the group was banned last year, 92% of UK ‘terrorism-related' arrests were linked to supporting Palestine Action.
It is Britain’s greatest current absurdity that an Irish writer of literary fiction has also been filed under ‘terrorist’. Rooney’s publishers have withdrawn her books from UK distribution; she could be arrested were she to set foot on British soil.
Since this ridiculousness came to light, the Bookseller reports her UK sales increasing by 331.6%, before her books go the same way as and in Texas schools and disappear completely.
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It's bleakly comedic. While once we smuggled condoms over the border from the North to the Republic, soon, it’ll be Sally Rooney novels being smuggled in reverse. Literary contraband.
You wouldn’t know whether to laugh or smash your head against the nearest wall.
Usually, it’s the content of books that gets them banned, which makes Sally Rooney’s case all the more incomprehensible to normal people.
In the case of Connell and Marianne, it’s not about the lingering literary sex they’re having, but about the profits their creator is donating to a group opposing genocide, while the British establishment continues arming Israel. Nothing at all to do with Connell and Marianne.
Not so in fundamentalist parts of the US — mostly Texas and Florida — where it’s content that gets books banned, irrespective of their literary merit. According to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, as well as Chaucer and Charlotte Brontë, everything from to manga is on the 2025/6 schools banned list.
11,982 titles in total, including , and, ironically — how very Orwellian of them. Memoirs like Tara Westover’s about how a semi-literate girl left a rural survivalist community in Idaho by self-educating herself all the way to a Cambridge PhD.
I am reminded of a postcard on my bookshelves — a bearded redneck holding up a handmade sign: ‘God Almighty hates book lerners’. He means authoritarian states — just ask Malala Yousafzai.
Salman Rushdie — on the wrong end of book-hate since 1988 — spoke recently about why dictators and authoritarian states are so afraid of books. Of writers, he said: “We don’t have any armies. We don’t even have that much money, apart from one or two of us.”
Yet from ayatollahs to Republicans, from Moscow to Beijing, theocrats and autocrats routinely ban books. “What books contain are versions of the world that are not the official version,” he said.
“And what all authoritarian regimes want is to have an official version.” Inside every book, good or bad, “There’s an unofficial version. And that’s what’s frightening.”
Restricting any literature for any reason is not a book club any democratic state would wish to join. Especially not the government of our closest neighbours, whose cack-handed misuse of anti-terrorist legislation has made a beloved literary writer contraband, and has made themselves look like Trumpian fundamentalists.
Absolute idiocy.
