It begins one evening with a knock on the front door of an ordinary house in Dublin. Eilish Stack lives there with her husband, Larry, and their four children.
Sean Sheehan
He is a trade union official for a teachers’ union and happens to be out when two policemen at the door ask to speak to him. No worries, they politely leave their card and leave. Eilish senses something amiss.
Everything that unfolds in “Prophet song” is told from Eilish’s perspective and the author, Paul Lynch, uses this to build up and sustain a growing sense of trepidation. The reader learns that the police are part of a new security force created by a government intent on stifling dissent and imposing its sense of order on the population. This background gradually leaks into the storyline as Eilish goes about caring for baby Ben, Baily aged 12, Molly 14 and the oldest son, Mark, who is 17
When Larry unaccountably goes missing the alarm factor is increased and it goes on rising. Eilish cannot establish what has happened to him and he becomes one of the ‘disappeared’ as the government becomes increasingly intolerant of criticism. Words like internment, national emergency and dissidents are bandied about as civil unrest grows. There are occasional references to other countries expressing concern but as an independent country Ireland goes its own way.
“Prophet song” has received a lot of praise, especially since winning the 2024 Booker Prize and the judges of that award acclaimed it “a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly”.
The anxieties are those of a liberal establishment terrified at the thought that their political and social order could collapse into civil conflict.
Watching scenes of mayhem in Gaza on screens is one thing but the idea that society could fracture and turn to mass violence in a modern European country is a nightmare.
Lynch’s novel is Eilish’s nightmare experienced in broad daylight as helicopter gunships move across the Dublin sky “like a slowly fragmented arrowhead”. When a bag of cement falls off a truck and a breeze blows its content around, the surrounding soldiers look “as though a dervish had come among them from some foreign war with its eyes closed and its arms held out”.
Lynch is good at charting societal breakdown as lived through by a mother struggling to keep her children together. The vision of a country in collapse is easily labelled dystopian but it will be all too familiar to those who become refugees and flee to Western Europe.
Lynch is well aware of this: “Why are we in the West so short on empathy for the refugees flooding towards our borders? “Prophet song” is partly an attempt at radical empathy. To understand better, we must first experience the problem for ourselves. And so I sought to deepen the dystopian by bringing to it a high degree of realism”.
“Prophet song”, by Paul Lynch, is published by One World.
(Photos: Pixabay)
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