Paul Lynch: Prophet Song. New York: Grove Atlantic, 2023.
Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, as far as mainstream narrative literature goes, cleared your host's expectations by little a bit.
As I approached the end, I had a thought that, if this novel had somehow come out 14 years ago, it would be the kind of novel that everyone needs to read. Someone would check on their bookish friend and find them sobbing, and they would say, “Oh it’s fine, I just finished reading Prophet Song.” It would have been like McEwan's Atonement (2001).
But because it came out in 2023, and our literary culture is dying along with everything else in our intellectual climate, it’s just another midlist novel, even though it won the Booker Prize last November.
Prophet Song is a dystopian narrative set in Ireland. Eilish Stark is an ordinary mother, her husband Larry organizes with the teachers union, and is detained and ultimately disappeared by the rising fascist government. We observe the emotional fallout on Eilish and her children, Mark, Molly, Baily, and baby Ben.
Ireland's republic quickly degenerates into an authoritarian regime, which is answered with an armed revolt. People have to choose whether to fight, hide, or flee the country.
There is also Eilish's father Simon, who is a bit touched, but has occasional moments of lucidity, such as these lines that he speaks early in the novel:
We are both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing mroe than what everyone can agree on — the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you cange ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true — this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you're watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.
Lynch employs an interesting style: long block paragraphs, no quotation marks for dialogue, and really no punctuation except for commas, full stops, and the occasional long dash. The prose is stark, present tense, deliberately toneless. But every once in a while we get an interesting phrase, usually in the context of Eilish's introspection, as here when she pines for Larry and his unknown fate: “Somewhere in the dark of her body a candle is burning for him but when she seeks the candle to light out past her body she meets only darkness.”
Her eldest boy Mark wants to join the resistance, but Eilish herself might be in denial about what they're really confronting. Here is another reflective moment, contemplating the child she is about to lose:
She wipes the rainwater off a white bench and sits down with a view onto the Liffey, the college rowers no longer on the water, the giving air, it was here on one of these benches that she sat with Larry and felt the quickening of the child that would be Mark, the first flutterings as though the child were growing wings to take flight from inside her.
This is a domestic literary novel, but it is besieged by military science fiction just as the family's home is now subject to airstrikes as the regime tries to eliminate the "terrorists." These are harrowing sequences, deliberately reminiscent of the Syrian civil war, the conflict in Chechnya, and most recently Israel's butchery of the Gaza Strip.
There are comparisons to be made with Saramago, and not just because of the similar formal elements. This novel is set in Ireland, but there are actually few details to reinforce that notion. Characters often refer to "the country," as if they can't name the place that is disintegrating around them, or as if this could happen to just about anybody anywhere in western Europe
In short, it's still an “allegorical” or relatively abstract narrative. Because we stick with a single family, we are remote from the high level events driving this civil war, for example, or what relationship this crisis has with the policies of developed capitalism, or historically to Ireland's previous nationalist conflicts and troubles up to the 1990s.
I've heard a familiar complaint from the novel's target audience that the characters aren’t “likeable.” Indeed, this is an extremely ordinary family. Eilish is not a perfect mom, and in various ways she and her children are severely not ready for the moment which comes out in emotional instability.
This is also part-and-parcel of this kind of mainstream apolitical political novel, where the real politics is in the background and the family structure is put forward (an idea worked out in the book on Kafka by Deleuze and Guattari, but I hate those guys).
On a basic referential level, this sequence of fascism and civil war most resembles the recent experience of Syria in the Middle East, which is also a proxy war between Iran backing Assad on one side and the US and Israel sponsoring rebel factions on the other side. It has been imported to a western European country (but specifically the only one with a colonial past), as a kind of “what if it happened to you” exercise.
Yes, it’s still a Booker Prize play, it’s still a middle-brow domestic drama, and that very same “what if” register has a way of keeping the reader “safe.” The text is more powerful when it reads to you not as an if but a when.
The kind of violence, horror, and confusion Lynch renders here is applause worthy. No one thinks this sort of hellish conflict could arise on their homestead. But this is where the 21st century is headed, if things don't change with the capitalist and imperialist system. The blood-soaked pictures in the news is a preview of what is to come, something you watch on a screen, until it’s outside your window, and then right before your eyes.
And then what will we do? Be like the man who says these lines?:
…if you’ve lived in one place all your life the idea of living someplace else is impossible, it’s what do you call it, neurological, it’s wired into the brain, we’ll just dig in, that’s what we’ll do, what else are you supposed to do anyhow…