BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Prophet Song (Paul Lynch, author)
Literary fiction, 2023 Booker Prize winner, Dublin, Ireland, dystopian near future, nationalism, curtailment of civil rights, arrests, disappeared citizens, resistance, motherhood, trauma, bombings.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is the 2023 Booker Prize award winner, and a literary tour de force. Set in Dublin, Ireland in a frighteningly near future, Prophet Song is a dystopian vision of a society in which a Nationalist party stages a creeping and then violent takeover of the wheels of government. The shift begins with restrictions on free speech and an Emergency Powers Act which permits the government to abbreviate and then eliminate and ignore citizens’ civil rights. It moves to political arrests, disappeared detainees, conscription of youth for “security forces”, curfews, food shortages and bombing of residential areas to rout out resistance fighters.
Eilish is a working mother of four, a clinical research scientist with four children aged 17, 14, 12 and infant. One evening police officers appear at her door looking for her husband, Larry, a high-ranking official in the national Teachers’ Union. Larry is not at home; anxiety rises. As the country drifts right and the National Party rises, reports of arrests of protestors and “agitators” surface. As a unionist, Larry is in the government’s crosshairs as the Union plans a march in advance of a strike. On the day of the Union’s March, Larry disappears, presumably arrested.
Eilish is not passive; she takes all the expected actions, contacting the Union and its attorney, locating an advocate, and visiting police stations and other holding areas to try to locate and visit her husband. All are to no avail. Party members begin to infiltrate her workplace, and neighbors fly Party flags. Eilish confers with other families who have had family members disappear and answers are nowhere to be found. During Larry’s absence, their eldest son, Mark, receives notice that upon his 18th birthday he is to report for military service. Because he is still a minor, Eilish maneuvers to send him to boarding school in Northern Island to avoid conscription, whereupon the family is publicly shamed as “traitors”. Mark rejects from the planned getaway and joins the resistance fighters.
Despite the uncertainty, Eilish attempts to preserve a modicum of daily normalcy for her children––making breakfast, assembling backpacks, driving children to child care and school and making family meals. Her attempts to assure them that their father will return grow increasingly difficult to sustain. Eilish bears the added responsibility of monitoring and caring for her widowed father who is in the early stages of dementia, yet lives independently across town in her childhood home. Eventually schools close and warfare erupts on the streets. Eilish’s stress is monumental.
The premise of Prophet Song is horrifying. The dystopian future state it depicts does not seem too far-afield from the nationalistic and autocratic sentiments blooming across the world. Lynch’s prose is at once dark and terse and deeply probing and evocative. Not only paints the grim reality faced by people around the world living in war zones,
Prophet Song makes all-too-real the impossible lives of Ukrainians, Gazans and countless others attempting to survive in the middle of raging wars, incurring unimaginable traumas, and assaulted by the larger world’s failure to come to their aid. Like any mother with children in a warzone, Eilish ruminates on the future her children will face:
She rubs her thumb along [her infant’s] jaw wondering what it is a child this age can know of the world, the odour of fear on her body, the child growing to know the smell that cannot be wished away nor suppressed, the child absorbing the mother’s trauma and storing it in his body for later use, the child become adult stricken by dread and blind anxiety, lashing out at those around him, she is holding a damaged man in her arms.
Lynch also exposes the fleeting and insufficient response given to these horrors by the world outside of the warzones, and the realization that all war is regional or local and that history is doomed to repeat itself:
…and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickeness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that 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.
It is this dark realization that compels Eilish to bear the burden of preserving her family and moving forward. Lynch insists on hope in the face of such despair. Pared down to simple survival in the face of scarcity of food and supplies, existing hour to hour under a daily barrage of shelling and explosions, cut off in a vacuum of information about the fate of disappeared love ones, all lines of communication severed, Eilish plummets into deep troughs of despair which she attempts to hide from her children. Nonetheless, she continues to take one exhausted step after another. Initially, she holds firmly to the conviction that she must remain in place and await her husband’s and son’s return. She is afterall constrained by her inability to secure a passport for her youngest child in light of her husband’s arrest. But, piece by piece, as doors and roads and businesses close, and food supplies evaporate, Eilish sheds the ties that bind her to her home and her country. She opts for hope on behalf of her surviving children. Prophet Song is an eye-popping elegy and a must read dark masterpiece.
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