Sunday, November 26, 2023, 9:53 p.m. GMT
With “Prophet Song” by Paul Lynch, the judges selected perhaps the most timely and urgent book on the shortlist – a novel that explicitly deals with global unrest and political tectonic forces. But it is also the very intimate, elemental story of a woman’s love for her family and her desperate attempts to hold on to the immediate world around her in the face of increasing chaos.
Lynch imagines an Ireland that has fallen under fascist control. Eilish Stack is a Dublin-based scientist and mother of four. Busy with work, family, and her elderly father, she averts her gaze from the increasingly worrying news reports. Then the grim reality knocks on her door: the newly created secret police arrive to question her husband Larry about his work as a trade unionist. Along with many others, he disappears into the abyss of the state. Her teenage children want to take to the streets—wearing the colors of protest, marching, fighting back—but Eilish just wants to hide them and keep them safe. When civil war breaks out and the streets of Dublin are filled with roadblocks and snipers, she remains in a state of denial. Her sister, who lives in Canada, begs her on the phone to try to escape. “History is a silent record of people who didn’t know when to leave.”
If Prophet Song is a dystopia, then, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it is a dystopia whose events are already unfolding around the world. Families like Eilish’s are suffering in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine and elsewhere, refugees are fleeing political violence, women’s rights are being violated around the world, and the far right is on the rise in Europe. The recent riots in Dublin and the associated shock and disbelief give the novel an unpleasant additional topicality.
Lynch has described his book as “an attempt at radical empathy” – using fiction to break through the normalized complacency of a Western society saturated with global news. It is written in the present tense, in claustrophobic blocks of prose, with long, haunting sentences that heighten the sense of inevitability. There are no quotation marks or paragraph breaks either – there is no respite for Eilish, no pause or respite in the nightmare.
Lynch’s prose has an evocative power reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, but tied to a vision that is frighteningly commonplace, even as it evokes the end times. This is a novel written to awaken the reader to truths we largely cannot admit: “You’ve been sleeping all your life, we’ve all been sleeping, and now the Great Awakening begins.”
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