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.
Prophet Song pp20-21Again, 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.
p117The 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.
I have a confession to make. I am often not a fan of the big literary prize winners. With a few notable exceptions, they can feel dry, without much of a plot or characters that I can relate to. I know I will ruffle some feathers admitting this and of course everyone comes to their reading experience in a different way with their own expectations.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the 2024 Booker Prize winner and was a nominated read for my book group early this year, but I missed that meeting and my turn only just came up on the borrower’s list at my local library this month. But I had heard many positive things about this book and I was keen to try it and form my own view. Unlike many Booker winners, it is a slender book, a novella really, so I was not faced with one of those weighty tomes to wade through. I took a deep breath and began.
In some respects this one lives up to my previous experience of literary prize winners. Here’s how:
- There’s not really a ‘plot’ to speak of. The narrative takes place over a single day, following six astronauts in an international space station as they orbit sixteen times around the earth. Things happen, but they are not events that move the plot forward in the traditional sense of a novel.
- There’s not a lot of character development or movement either. We learn a little about each of the astronauts, who are from six different countries, and something of their lives before embarking on this mission. But that’s kind of it. No great emotional insight to speak of, no huge conflict (inner or interpersonal), no emotional arc over the book’s duration.
- The author has a tendency to say in many words, and sometimes very long sentences, what could perhaps be said in just a few.
Did I grow impatient and annoyed, as I would ordinarily do whilst reading a book like this? No, I did not. I know these characteristics have irritated some readers and I can understand why, but what stood out instead for me about Orbital were these features:
- Exquisite descriptive writing conjuring exactly what the view from a space module’s window must look like at various times of the ‘day’ and ‘night’.
- Startling insights into the regular routine of life on board. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have never considered, for example, that orbiting the earth like this means that the astronauts experience multiple sunrises and sunsets in one 24-hour period. Actually the human construct of time means very little in space. How do astronauts adapt to this?
‘The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.’ p76 - Glimpses into the psyche of an astronaut. Either the author interviewed current or past astronauts or else has a vivid imagination and emotional intelligence; either way, she brings the inner world of her characters to life so that readers can understand a little of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of space travel: the competing demands of home and space, what feels real and what simply imagined.
- Fascinating facts about the humdrum and ordinary. How do people in space eat, sleep, wash, exercise, spend leisure time? What are their daily chores and responsibilities? How do you exist in such close confines for months at a time with a small group like that, with no outlet or way to be with others or to be truly alone?
- What is it like to do a spacewalk, outside the space station module? Terrifying? Electrifying? Like coming home? Perhaps all of these.
What I most enjoyed about Orbital, though, is the way the author puts into perspective our globe, our earth: our (so far at least) one-and-only home, and the way the astronauts’ feelings gradually change over time about it as they gaze down on it from above:
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold…to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakenly home…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It is not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive.
Orbital p73Orbital was published by Penguin Random House UK in 2024
