Terrifying and timely: ‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch

This 2023 Booker Prize winning novel is terrifying because we are immediately plunged into its setting of a modern, Western nation in the thrall of an oppressive regime that is gaining more control every day.

It’s timely because – well, have you seen the news lately?

It’s certainly a dystopian story but, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the horror is all too believable right from the outset. In Prophet Song, no armed coup results in a change of government – the country’s people (Ireland, in this case) voted them in. While segments of the community are in support of the ever-increasing controls over life and liberty that result, many try to resist, and are punished for it.

Hmm…where does that remind me of?

There is no gentle lead-in for the reader. The opening pages see Eilish, mother of four, answering the door to two plainclothes police who, we learn, are from Ireland’s newly formed secret police. They are polite but insistent: she is to tell Larry, her husband, that they want to interview him. Larry is a teacher’s union representative and planning a march in support of working conditions and pay. The government wants it stopped.

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that soon after, Larry joins the increasing numbers of the ‘disappeared’ – men, women and children who are whisked away and not seen again. For almost the entirety of the book we are with Eilish, coping on her own as best she can while the restrictions and brutalities increase around her. For a long time she tries to convince her family (and herself) that all will be fine, that their father will return soon.

Eventually she has to admit that everything is far from alright.

There are echoes of dystopian novels like Brave New World or 1984, especially with the way the regime uses a kind of ‘doublespeak’ to present its own version of reality to the people, and the ramping up of violence as the country falls apart.

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 is really nothing new, but you are watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.
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Again, what does that remind you of in the world right now?

Eilish is a completely believable character. We can only applaud her heroic efforts to keep family and home together while the social and civil systems that we all rely on, become unglued.

We are also privy to her agonies about deciding whether to stay or to get out while they can, and understand all the reasons why a family can’t just up and go: financial, not wanting to leave an elderly vulnerable relative, or a lack of appropriate paperwork to legally leave.

The narrative style is fast and furious, long sentences with minimal punctuation, sentences often running into each other. It invokes a sense of panic, of events unfolding at a pace too fast to absorb and impossible to control. There are also passages of beautiful prose:

She sits before the laptop on the kitchen table adrift and unbecome, the night borne through the open window, the city murmuring to the dreaming trees.
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The ending is ambiguous, allowing each reader to decide what happens to Eilish and her little family.

The genius of the novel is its setting: readers are plunged into the realities of the reasons why people do choose to leave and become asylum seekers. But this is Ireland, in the modern day; the characters are Westernised people who speak English. If we are like them, we relate to them. The back cover blurb includes this: How far would you go to save your family? I recall this line on Tshirts and posters in support of people’s right to seek asylum here in Australia. This novel takes us there, to the reaons why, without being didactic or trite.

It is a terrifying book, but I found it propulsive and absorbing. And so, so timely.

Prophet Song was published by OneWorld in 2023.