If ever anyone was in doubt about what happens when political extremists take control of their country, they just have to read Paul Lynch’s Booker prize-winning novel Prophet Song.
Lynch imagines that a rightwing National Alliance party has seized power in the Republic of Ireland using wide-sweeping emergency legislation to stamp out opposition. Trade unionists who are campaigning for increased teachers’ wages are rounded up and never seen again. Civil liberties are swept aside amid curfews, armed checkpoints and interrogations by a secret police force. No-one escapes scrutiny; even young schoolchildren are classed as enemies of the state and forcibly removed.
This vision of a country at war with itself is presented through the experience of the Slack family from Dublin. One night members of the special detective force knock on their door. They have questions for Larry Slack, deputy general secretary of the teachers’ union. It’s nothing special they reassure his wife. but soon after their visit, Larry takes part in a teachers’ rally and then disappears.
His wife, Eilish is left to pick up the pieces, trying to protect her four children and keep alive their belief that Larry will return home one day. Her situation becomes ever more untenable when the nation descends into full-blown civil war, her eldest son goes off to fight with the rebels and another son refuses to obey the curfew.
Prophet Song brilliantly evokes the chaos of life in a country under attack. Its citizens face a daily struggle to keep up a semblance of normality despite power cuts, food shortages and airstrikes, all the while fearful they will be the next target of the secret police.
A lucky few escape across the border with the help of an underground network and relatives overseas but for Eilesh that would mean abandoning two people she loves dearly — her husband and her father who has early stage dementia. She fluctuates between panic — if they stay, her entire family will be destroyed — and hope — international pressure will surely bring this regime to an end.
Prophet Song Is a tough novel to read and not just because it’s so bleak. Paul Lynch tells the story entirely from Eilish’s perspective in continuous present tense which can swing suddenly from dialogue to descriptions or interior thought processes. Adding to this complexity is the fact there are no paragraph breaks or speech tags.
The style and tone reminded me at times of Milkman by Anna Burns, another Irish winner of the Booker Prize. Both novels were challenging to get into initially but as I read on, I was pulled in deeper and deeper to the point I just couldn’t stop reading.
Though set in Ireland, Lynch’s novel transcends the boundaries of just one country to reflect on the reality of political upheaval across the world. It’s impossible to read it without seeing parallels to the current conflict in the Ukraine and the worrying rise of the Far Right in several parts of the world. As Eilish reflects, freedom and liberty are eroded while the world sleeps, unaware until too late…
… the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore …
Passionate and disturbing in equal measure, Prophet Song is not without flaws. Lynch excels at compressing multiple images to describe a scene ( “a low and cold grayness and the fire in ashes, litter strewn about the fallow field.” ) and creating tension. We get some tremendous set pieces, the most powerful of which sees Eilish run across the city at night in the midst of an air strike to search for her teenage son.
But the narrative can sometimes feel forcibly “poetic”. Noise “blooms into sleep”, Eilish is “suddened” into waking a dark room and coats are “sleeved on” (as if there is any other way of putting on a coat without placing arms into sleeves.). Even more of an irritant was Lynch’s repetitive use of the phrase “as though” to signify a simile. On one page alone I counted three instances of this device — once you find it, it’s hard to ignore and gets in the way of the narrative.
Despite those issues, Prophet Song is still a remarkable and haunting novel. Whether it offers any hope for the future depends I think on how you interpret the ending.
We're all friends here. Come and join the conversation