Book review: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
A dirge for our times
The political becomes the intensely personal in this brilliant book which has just won the Booker Prize for 2023. The dark allegorical story shows us a dystopian version of Ireland in the near future with a populist right-wing government at the helm. While set in Ireland, it reflects multiple political realities around the world; what is the present state of affairs in one place could well be the past or future of another place. And the prophet song at the end alludes to the cyclical nature of how life plays out.
Eilish Stack finds her ordinary, happy life horrifyingly disrupted when her husband is picked up for questioning by the secret police. As she waits for him to return, first with hope and later with futile helplessness, she has a greater task at hand. She needs to tend to and protect her family of four, which includes a baby. She needs to check in on her father who is slowly slipping into dementia. She needs to attend to various practical matters. She needs to cling onto her job as a senior microbiologist as best she can; food has to be put on the table. Her house is vandalized by thugs and later ravaged by bombs but must still be kept going. And in the midst of all this, she has to deal with the fallout, physical and mental, of the events taking place in the country.
The totalitarian government follows the same rulebook that all such governments do, but of course. Freedoms are chipped away incrementally. Ownership of institutions are changed and replaced with lackeys. The flow of information is controlled. The media is coerced into servility, the judiciary silenced. People are branded as subversive or terrorists before disappearing or being jailed. The silence of the state is wielded as both carrot and stick.
As it happens when people are squeezed relentlessly, the hardship and pain become unbearable and the fear of authority is conquered, there is an attempt to fight back. With his freedom trampled on and his future in tatters, Eilish’s eldest son joins the resistance movement. However, fighting back is not an option the mother has. She has to keep her head down, simply to safeguard her family. As that family gets fragmented, Eilish puts up a formidable fight to stave off the inevitable.
A people under occupation
The depiction of a people under occupation is one that catches at the reader`s throat and lodges itself there. Eilish Stack makes the strongest impression but all the characters are drawn in a manner that stay with the reader. One travels with Eilish as she goes from living a happy mundane life to waiting, at the end, to escape to a better place in an inflatable boat across treacherous seas. In Eilish, the reader sees many citizens who are suddenly forced to turn refugees. The children are portrayed as distinctive characters who deal in differing ways with the turbulence that engulfs them. At one stage, Lynch talks of the inherited trauma that a baby will manifest while growing into adulthood after being born in such times, a passage that verily breaks the reader`s heart.
It is a sardonic look at freedom, at free will. There are long sentences, there are no paragraph breaks, it is one continuous outpour, and this adds to the pervasive feeling of dread and anxiety that underpins the story. The language of the book is protean, lyrical and keenly perceptive. In one place, Eilish observes that the `dawn has come and yet the day has fled, she can see this now, how the light that makes insubstantial the dark is false and it is night that remains true and unshaken.`
Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Yemen, the Troubles all come to the reader`s mind inevitably, inexorably. This book is bound to be compared to those by Orwell, Atwood and McCarthy. In an interview, the author had said that he is always trying to alert the reader to the moment, trying to articulate the passing moment; he does this exceedingly well. In fact, one wonders if this book can be called dystopian at all, in the light of the violent anti-immigrant fuelled arson and rioting in Dublin. Or when one after the other, countries in Europe and elsewhere elect right-wing governments. Or when freedoms are obliterated with nary a protest.
And of course, this is a cautionary tale. Beware, it seems to say. Do not take your liberty for granted. As the prophet’s song says at the end, somebody’s hell in another country could, in time, be your hell, too. Brecht is quoted at the beginning of the book, the famous paragraph that there will be singing about the dark times in the dark times. Prophet Song, then, is the song for our present times, though it is undoubtedly more lament than song.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Oneworld Books. 309 pages. 599 rupees
This ran in the Sunday Express Magazine of 17 December 2023.
Sheila Kumar • December 17, 2023