By Paul Lynch, this was published in 2023, and won that year's Booker Prize.

I opted for the audio-version, which was very convincingly narrated by Gerry O'Brien. Having read some of the critique (and checked the Kindle sample to see if said critique was right), I ended up really glad that I'd consumed Prophet Song this way... Lynch writes without paragraph breaks, so each section is one long, running piece of narrative, and conversations are likewise unmarked by punctuation or paragraphing. I get that this technique gives a headlong, breathless feel to the writing. But I hate this kind of thing... Call me old-fashioned, but I feel the conventions of punctuation are there for a reason -- they aid the reader -- and leaving them aside just gives that reader unnecessary labour. In this case, the labour was all O'Brien's, and I'm very grateful for that.

OK, so that gripe's out of the way... What I'm left with is a very, very thought-provoking, not to say thoroughly disturbing, piece of writing.


Paul Lynch

We're in Dublin, at a point just a little way in the future. The tyrannical National Alliance Party government, supported by the secret police it created with its Emergency Powers Act, is gradually squeezing the life out of any political resistance, and indeed any social normality.

Our lead character is Eilish Stack, a microbiologist who has just returned to work after maternity leave for a late addition to the family. Her trade unionist husband, Larry, is the first one they come for. After that the family is already starting to find itself stigmatized and disadvantaged. Then it's Mark, her oldest son, who -- in order to escape conscription -- first goes into hiding, and then joins the rebels. Which unleashes a firestorm of persecution. Eilish loses her job; permission to travel overseas is denied; the car is vandalized; the house is daubed with slogans; the family is harassed. There's an oppressive feeling that the absolute worst of the world's bullies are now the only ones in charge.

It all happens slowly but relentlessly. At first, the arrests and disappearances are happening in the midst of very recognizable daily routine. Bit by bit, however, that daily routine breaks down, as the country sinks into civil war, and supplies of food, water, and electricity grow unreliable, and checkpoints make circulating within the city dangerous and time-consuming.

The book makes you ask yourself questions. At what point would you have left? Eilish was offered a way out fairly early on, courtesy of Aine, her sister in Canada, but she refused. She has her elderly father to keep an eye on (he's starting with dementia). She has three other children to look after. Molly and Bailey are teenagers, terribly traumatized by the life they're now forced to live; Ben is only a baby. And what if Larry, or Mark, comes back, and finds them all gone? So she won't hear of leaving.

In the end, she does leave, though. By now she's alone with Molly and the baby. Her father has been spirited out to safety by Aine. And Bailey? Well, they "came for" him, too. This is the most harrowing scene in the book by a long chalk. Injured by shrapnel from a bit of armed conflict that unfolded right on their doorstep, the lad is taken to hospital (the journey a fraught and arduous process in a war-torn city). But when Eilish returns to visit him the next day, she finds he's been "transferred". To where? Well, it isn't good. After an anguished search, she finally finds him. But he's dead in a bag, and has obviously been tortured. He's 13.

So, at the end, we find the three remaining family members in the hands of people-smugglers. Already they've been bundled into a lorry, and locked up in a safe house with a crowd of others. Now, minus most of their belongings, they're on a beach, and boarding a boat. Future uncertain.


We associate forced disappearance with countries like North Korea. Lynch wants to shake us out of this complacency

You can't easily shrug off this story. I finished it on the bus to Sibu, and although I switched immediately to something else, this horror story kept buzzing around in the back of my mind. I have absolutely no doubt that this scenario could happen anywhere. No-one is immune. Our political "freedom" can turn on a dime. And the most scary thing about Prophet Song -- the top of a pyramid where pretty much everything that happens is scary -- is that a goodly section of the population is behind this terror. It's not just a question of the populace on one side, and the iron hand of government on the other. Rather, it's people against other people. This book shows us many citizens who feel that the draconian way the government is exercising its authority is absolutely OK.

Lynch is quoted as saying: "My themes tend to be more metaphysical than political. A lot of political fiction begins with its own answer -- it knows the problem and it knows the solution -- and so therefore, it’s about grievance. And I think the work of serious fiction must instead be grief: grief for the things we cannot control, grief for what cannot be understood, grief for what lies beyond us."

There are a couple of exchanges that underline the uncontrollable, incomprehensible nightmare that humans can suddenly find themselves in. When Aine is trying to persuade her sister to get out, she stresses: "History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave." Eilish's viewpoint, however, is equally valid: "History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice..."

Now, I admit that I found the inexorability of Prophet Song hard to handle. There are very few breathing-spaces. Even when there's a "normal" family scene, you know it's actually not normal, because this oppressive political climate has settled around everyone like a blanket. I understand that inexorability is a faithful depiction of how these things are. But it makes for quite a heavy listen.



***

Perhaps this is why it's a book that has divided readers somewhat. This blogger, for example, is unconvinced, complaining that it's "a fiction that always feels entirely context-free". But isn't that the point? We know it's Ireland, because things have to happen somewhere. But isn't the idea to make it as generic as possible, challenging us all to fill in the details with whatever is appropriate for our own situation?

Others see it as "crucial reading": "A literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere."

Having just finished We Are Free To Change the World, a study of Hannah Arendt by Lyndsey Stonebridge, I found Eve Patten's take very resonant: "The Booker prize-winning novel is a perfect study of the banality of totalitarianism... The slide from ordinary to extraordinary is captured in the smallest domestic details."

It's the "at home" thing that makes this book so powerful. There's a section near the end that goes something like this: "The prophet sings not of the end of the world, but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore."

In so many places across the world, people's "at homes" are currently being threatened. Now, more than ever, we can never rule anything out. So who's next?


A door at Kuching bus station... Amusing, but it takes on different connotations if you're still in the depths of Prophet Song...