I only became aware of Prophet Song when it won the Booker Prize over Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, a big, important book about one of the defining issues of our time. I was selling Paul Lynch short. Prophet Song is more compact than The Bee Sting, but it’s also an important book about the world we live in.
Eilish Stack is a middle-aged, middle-class Irish woman working in a science lab and raising four children with her husband Larry, a leader in the teacher’s union. Their perfectly pleasant domesticity is forever disrupted when two policeman knock on their door and say they need to speak with Larry. These officers are with a new division of the Irish Garda, established by the newly-empowered National Alliance Party, who are enlarging the powers of the state and cutting down on personal liberties.
At first, Eilish is reliant on the certainty that her husband has done nothing wrong, but as time goes on and the state refuses to let her speak to Larry or even tell her where he is being held or why, her faith in the world as she has always known it begins to shatter. As the state begins to assert its dominance over every aspect of civilian life, Eilish finds herself frozen out at work and increasingly at odds with her older children, who are more aware of what’s going on than Eilish would wish. She also has to deal with her aging father, who seems to be entering the early stages of dementia and is becoming increasingly hostile to her attempts to help him.
The central question of Prophet Song is, essentially, when exactly do things get so bad you have to leave? How do you know that things aren’t going to go back to normal before it gets too late to do anything about it? Eilish has people in her life telling her she should get out practically from the very start, but it’s not as simple a choice as it seems. Can she give up her hope that her husband might still be alive? Can she abandon her father, who insists he’s too old to go somewhere new? And of course there are the more practical concerns, such as the state refusing to renew her passport since her family has been marked as opponents of the party.
It’s impossible to read this novel and not think about current events. All over the world families are facing the choices faced by Eilish and her children. People forced into survival mode, practically starving, incapable of fighting back and unable to leave. Knowing that every time they walk out their door they might be killed. It’s just that it usually happens in places that the West finds easier to ignore or write off. Lynch’s accomplishment is laying out a chillingly plausible scenario through which a traditional Western liberal democracy can become a police state torn apart by terror and broken off into factions. He pierces through the “can’t happen here” security blanket in a way guaranteed to frighten his audience and hopefully wake them up the fragility of their existence and encourage more empathy towards the many people suffering around the globe.
And yet, I have a few quibbles with Prophet Song. Lynch sometimes write like a poet who got lost on his way to work, deliberately choosing the wrong word or the wrong form of a word in order to get the reader to notice the prose. The telephone “belled” instead of rang. Eilish “sleeved” her coat instead of putting it on. It’s intentionally discordant, to be sure, but the effect wasn’t what he intended, at least for me.
As the book went on, I began to wonder more and more about Lynch’s choice of a female protagonist. Eilish makes some choices that seem more driven by emotionality than clear thinking, and while that may be entirely realistic for any character in such a nightmarish scenario, the fact that she is doing so as a woman written by a man started to nag at me a little bit. Not enough to overwhelm the power of the narrative, but it was a thought I couldn’t easily dismiss.
On the whole, however, Prophet Song is a very compelling story. In plain terms Lynch has laid out a blueprint for how the unthinkable could become the inevitable.