Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

First published in the UK in 2023; published by Grove Atlantic on December 22, 2023

Prophet Song is a dystopian tale of an authoritarian Irish government that makes drastic changes in the lives of Dubliners after a far-right political party is voted into office. Irish citizens naively believe they still have rights, but rights are useless when an unchecked government disregards them.

Larry Stack is the deputy general secretary of the Teachers Union of Ireland. The garda accuse him of acting against the interests of the state by (in Stack’s view) engaging in peaceful industrial action to better the working conditions of teachers. Workers who organize and demand better wages are branded as communists by the far right political party that controls the government. The Garda treat a peaceful march for workers’ rights as a riot. The Garda begin to snatch up union leaders pursuant to newly enacted emergency powers. They place Larry in detention. They arrest journalists. They impose curfews. As time goes on, the government takes control of the media and cuts off access to foreign news.

Larry and his wife Eilish have four kids. Eilish must do her best to hold the family together until Larry returns. But will he return? She wants her oldest son Mark to leave the country so he will not be conscripted into national service, but the government won’t renew the family’s passports. Her plan to smuggle Mark into Northern Ireland is foiled when he refuses to run away from the fight against tyranny.

After Mark disappears, Eilish’s daughter tells her they should all leave the country, but Eilish’s father is developing dementia and she doesn’t know who will take care of him. A sister who lives in Canada tells her that “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”

When an insurrection takes root, the reader sees it from Eilish’s limited perspective. It is a topic of conversation among people standing in line at the grocer, the subject of newspaper articles she skims. Her attention is focused on more personal issues. She loses her job when her son is branded a traitor. Her younger son blames her for his father’s disappearance. The butcher refuses to serve her because Mark’s name has been published in a list of traitors.

The focus on Eilish gives the novel its power. As the novel moves forward, Eilish finds herself in the middle of a civil war that she can’t wrap her head around. She doesn’t want to abandon her life. She can’t grasp the reality that she can never have that life back. Her house is literally in the middle of a war zone; a newly constructed checkpoint prevents her from traveling on her street. Bombs are falling; mortars are exploding; her roof is collapsing. When rebels seize the street, their curfew and restrictions are just as bad as the government’s, leaving Eilish to tell a curfew enforcer that her son didn’t fight to replace a government with “more of the same.”

The last stages of the story move with the pace of a thriller as Eilish undertakes a journey to freedom. The novel invites the reader to ask what freedom means and what price is worth paying for it. Like other refugees, Eilish regards freedom as an abstract concept that is secondary to the struggle to keep her children alive. While Eilish once believed in free will, she now understands that she has lost the ability to make meaningful choices. Her options are dictated by men with guns.

I don’t think I’ve read another novel that brought home quite so forcefully the experience of civilians who struggle to live in a war zone. Eilish’s constant fear, her desperate attempts to keep her children safe, her self-recriminations for not bringing them out of the country (even at the risk of leaving her husband and father behind) while there was still an opportunity for safe travel, all invite sympathy and understanding, not just for Eilish but for anyone whose life has been disrupted by war.

Scenes that might be familiar — a parent whose mind is slipping away, a child who hurls vile insults at a parent in response to stressful moments — are devoid of the melodrama that a lesser writer might invoke. Paul Lynch strips the scenes to their essence, underplaying the drama to achieve a greater sense of realism.

Prophet Song isn’t overly difficult to read, although long blocks of text without paragraph breaks might be unappealing to some readers. (Read the Amazon reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s novels and you’ll learn that some readers don’t know how to use bookmarks when a writer refuses to make reading easy for them.) The story is so engaging that empathic readers — even those with limited attention spans — should be able to stick with it. Those who do will be rewarded, just as Lynch was rewarded with a well-deserved Booker Prize.

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