In Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, the horror of a dictatorship unfolds in the backdrop against which Eilish, the story’s protagonist, attempts to keep her family alfoat in a society teetering on the edge of collapse. Set in a counterfactual Ireland ruled by the National Alliance Party with sweeping emergency powers, Prophet Song opens when Larry Stack, a teachers’ union worker and father of four, is arrested by a newly-established secret police resembling Stalin’s NKVD. As it turns out, he is among the many the regime has “disappeared”: arrested for the ‘security threats’ they pose to public safety. The plot is propelled by his wife, Eilish Stack who, in the aftermath of the arrest, grapples with an increasingly hostile society descending into authoritarianism, and the thousand big and small ways in which this penetrates her life: food shortages, inflation, Party members being appointed to public and private jobs, growing militarism, and so on.
In the days since I finished the book, I have had a hard time pinning down my thoughts. On the one hand, it is a well done book, and I was rapt throughout. On the other, it felt contrived, and at times, the suspension of disbelief it demanded was all too much.
On how the book is done: with no paragraph or dialogue breaks, Prophet Song conveys a relentlessness that is matched only by the sense of claustrophobia it builds around Eilish. There is no respite for Eilish and the Stacks, and neither is there respite for those reading about them. How could there be? The book is especially excellent at conveying the bureaucratic horror of an all-powerful state. A scene towards the end of Eilish going from hospital to hospital trying to find her son is eerily Kafkasque. Lynch also keeps the contours of the ‘political crisis’ that brough the NAP to power vague. We are not told what the ideological positions are or what is at stake: for all you know, it could be an invention of the NAP. The crisis is in effect a blank, an event without history.
In the larger scheme of the book, this choice makes sense. Prophet Song isn’t interested in investigating how societies descend into authoritarian rule, it is interested in the intimate experience of this. It asks, do you resist, do you protest? Should Eilish throw herself into the fight against the regime, potentially putting her children in harm’s way? Does Larry get tortured or die if she fights? Eilish’s way out for the moment might be to keep her head down and keep the family together, but the question remains unresolved. Elsewhere, Eilish’s sister tells her, ‘History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.’ This is Prophet Song’s more pressing concern: when do you leave? When and how do you know it is time to leave?
Yet at the same time, as the book progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to see why Eilish continues to stay, even though Lynch brings out a familiar litany of reasons: she’s waiting for Larry, there’s her father, there are the passports. Eilish’s continued denial of the state’s everyday violence too, is hard to believe. A scientist with a PhD, her character is at times astonishingly out of touch with the news. How, for instance, did she and her politically active husband misread a crisis of such proportions? Maybe that is the point, that ‘good’ people miss the writing on the wall, that they can continue to live in denial until it is far too late.
However, a conflict without a history also means that we have to take Lynch’s all-too-clean classification of people into victims and agents of the regime at face value. There’s a circularity to Prophet Song: the regime is destructive because it is evil, and it is evil because it is destructive; the people are suffering because they are vicims, they are victims because they are suffering. Without the moral amiguity that a political crisis or moral and/or ideological differences beget, the book at times felt like it was speaking to the already converted. In separating the evil from the good people, the book seems to say that the worst thing that could happen to us would be to become victim of such a state, and not having to confront the horror that we might be complicit in creating a rather monstrous world. Or what one must answer isn't simply the question of when to leave, but deal with the unravelling of an entire nation. This begs more questions: is the country worth fighting for if the state is compromised? And since that is unclear, what is the ‘freedom’ the rebels are fighting for? Is leaving difficult simply because of the logistics, as Eilish seems to suggest, or is displacement about something more? Here, I’m not sure Prophet Song’s bare-bones structure pays off.
To be fair to Lynch, the book was never intended to be a definitive story about the end of civilised society. “This is a novel about what has been, what continues to be and what will always be,” Lynch told The Guardian in an interview after Prophet Song won the Booker. “There is no biblical end-of-days. We destroy the world again and again and again and you watch it on the news.” Indeed, people live in and die trying to escape oppressive regimes all the time, and Prophet Song is nothing if not powerfully aware of this. But then one has to ask: what audience is Lynch speaking to? Is Eilish’s parable more chilling because it takes place in a Western European democracy? In my less charitable moments, I couldn’t help but feel like Lynch was willing a book into existence for the express purpose of saying, look, this can happen here too, this can happen to us too. An important truth to convey, but one that feels like it has left out the most important details in the bargain to arrive at it.
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"but one that feels like it has left out the most important details in the bargain to arrive at it."
do you think one has to read the book to understand this interesting implication?