Prophet Song: Survival and struggle in dystopian Ireland

PAUL Lynch’s latest novel, nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize, paints a chilling portrait of his native Ireland descending into a fascist regime.

In vivid and lyrical prose, Prophet Song depicts the suffering of innocent people caught in the maelstrom of societal collapse.

The story begins with a worrying house visit from the new secret police to the ordinary home of the Stack family. Larry Stack is a teachers’ unionist whose work has come under the scrutiny of the new Irish government.

But as the country spirals down a perilous path and Larry is detained, it is up to his determined wife Eilish to keep their four children alive.

The novel’s chief achievement is in the focus and restraint of Lynch’s narrative, in a twist on what has become an established literary genre. The novel’s backdrop is political, and the themes are reminiscent of earlier dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. 

But unlike its predecessors, Lynch’s novel is not interested in mapping the contours of totalitarianism. Instead, he keeps a tight, almost claustrophobic focus on Eilish alone, picturing her daily struggles with obtaining food for her family, mothering teenage children and an infant, while caring for a deteriorating elderly father. 

With her, the reader is forced to negotiate the horrors of the totalitarian bureaucracy, an endless parade of mostly nameless and faceless state workers enacting evil on her through banal paper pushing. 

Lynch traps the narrative within the confines of Eilish’s mind, keeping the reader from viewing that which Eilish does not understand. In doing so, he renders a disorienting but realistic portrait of an ordinary person’s experience of tyranny and conflict. 

Lynch’s prose is also remarkable. He moves adeptly between the mundane and the poetic, wrapping realism with allegory and imagery. His long, sinuous sentences hold the tension well, and he deploys them to layer emotion on top of emotion as Eilish’s fear and dread bubble over the surface.

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These elements combine in their most potent form when Eilish is forced again and again to make impossible choices. 

For example, when her sister reaches out from Canada with the possibility of smuggling the family out of Ireland, Lynch takes us through each twist and turn as Eilish reaches for every excuse not to leave, creating in words a picture of an anxiety attack.

Yet, for all the novel’s artistic achievements, it is not an easy book to read. The unrelenting prose and harrowing circumstances are lightened only by Lynch’s reaches for the poetic, and a tight plot which neither drags nor sags. There is little hope for the reader to cling on to, other than Eilish’s own will to survive.

The novel’s impact is also its timing – it is a canary in an already suffocating coal mine as the world currently grapples with armed conflicts in Ukraine and the Levant. 

Still, more than any moral or ideological pronouncement, it is the suffering of those swept up in the tide which deserves our attention.

As another woman says to Eilish towards the end of the book as they seek to leave Ireland: “I don’t see how free will is possible when you are caught up within such a monstrosity, one thing leads to another thing until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do.”