Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is a timely dystopian narrative detailing a slow yet devastating totalitarian takeover in Ireland. It was awarded the Booker Prize in 2023—a major win for the independent publishing house One World—and continues to be discussed for its heavy themes and unconventional style. Lynch, an Irish author, sought to examine “the problem of Syria” and “the implosion of an entire nation” by imagining it in a Western society. His approach makes the topic all the more terrifying, challenging the supposed security of the Western world; he insists upon a devastating reality by looking, or rather creating it, elsewhere.
The novel follows Eilish Stack and her family as they try to navigate the changing country, at first only feeling faint pulses of change before being shaken by its force. It begins with an unsettling visit by the GNSB (Garda National Services Bureau) at the Stack household. They inquire after her husband, Larry, who is involved in planning an upcoming labor union protest. Then Larry disappears, arrested during the protest, and Eilish must manage the important things—school, work, the children, caring for her elderly father—alongside her growing fears, which begin to manifest in terrifying dreams. The world depicted at this point is relatively normal and no different from our own, but descends into one of curfews, monitored calls, food shortages, zone restrictions, distant gunfire, and bombings.
There are no paragraph breaks or quotes to mark off dialogue, but this seems to be in the Irish tradition, since authors like James Joyce, Sally Rooney, and Cormac McCarthy refrain from using double or even single quotes in their work. It takes some time to understand how to pick out a character’s voice and to not get lost in all the lines, but the chunks of text certainly add to the suffocating, uneasy atmosphere. For a book so focused on exposing and bringing awareness to real tragedies, it works using relatively obscure language and means, and this is part of the allure.
At the beginning, there is a vague sense that the country is recovering from a moment of weakness (much like our COVID-19 pandemic), allowing a provisional government with unclear intentions to form, but not much else is explained. The reader only knows as much as Eilish does, and withholding information puts her and the reader in the same boat. Though it would be helpful to fully understand the unfolding political situation, this is not a significant detriment to the story. In doing this, Lynch actually replicates how a citizen experiences censorship, how they are kept in the dark, often until it is too late.
Against the wishes of her children and her sister in Canada, Eilish stands her ground in Ireland. She stays for a number of reasons, and this hard decision is one many refugees share. As conditions worsen and her own neighborhood becomes a war zone, she still remains. This tension is continually tugged at throughout:
History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.
It is, of course, no simple task for the Stack family to flee the country while under strict government surveillance, but Eilish does not seem to try, even when offered help from overseas agencies. Denial seems to motivate her character, rather than defiance or bravery. This is, to an extent, realistic, albeit frustrating to watch. It is difficult to distinguish the borders between hope and denial when, for Eilish, they are so blurred—this also leads to the question, how much of denial is hope? The reader might find themselves shaking the book as if shaking Eilish, begging her to do something. Because of this, her state of paralysis also felt like a convenient and deliberate way to draw out the plot. That is, until no other content could be derived from her staying, until the only next plausible event might have been her and her family’s death.
The dialogue also felt quite unnatural; for instance, when Eilish is talking about her father needing to remain in Ireland, she says, “In time there will be nothing left to him but shadows, a strange dream of the world, to send him into exile now would be to condemn him to a kind of nonexistence.” Sometimes her son Bailey talks in the same mysterious manner, which is unusual for a thirteen-year-old. Lynch seems to have his characters descend into eerie orations at least once a chapter—it is out of place and interrupts the reading experience.
The last thirty or so pages detail her escape, a tumbling series of events that felt unbalanced and rushed in comparison to the 280 pages before it. Its Booker Prize is well-deserved; it is a haunting and moving novel. Unfortunately, it also says something when these types of narratives are praised. It seems that only when the conflict is turned around on us, the Western world, we begin to care. Can sympathy not also be found in true accounts, in acknowledging reality as reality? For now, Prophet Song, though a tricky substitution, will have to do.
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