Paul Lynch
The winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song makes for a harrowing reading experience. The events take place in Ireland, but the descent into madness it portrays reflects what is currently happening in some parts of the world.
The events unfold as the elected rightwing National Alliance Party of the Republic of Ireland creeps toward strangling its population. The repression goes unnoticed at first. But then trade union lobbyists disappear. Civil liberties erode. Freedom of movement, freedom of speech are severely restricted. Legal recourse for locating missing loved ones is non-existent. Dissenters are captured, tortured, and killed. Civil war breaks out with innocent people caught in the crossfire. Snipers take pot shots at civilians. Bombs drop on homes with sleeping residents. Road blocks litter the town. Food shortages, curfews, sporadic electrical power cuts, house searches, internet blackouts, and bureaucratic labyrinths become routine. The institutions of a civilized world collapse.
This nightmare scenario is experienced through the eyes of a young mother of four, Eilish Stack. Larry, her husband and trade union leader, is taken by the security forces and disappears. Eilish struggles to maintain some semblance of normalcy for her children and for her elderly father who has dementia. All the while, she keeps hoping Larry will walk through the door and life will get back to normal. He never does, and life only gets worse. Her eldest son joins the rebellion and disappears. Her younger son refuses to attend school. Her daughter withdraws into herself and is not eating. And her infant son demands to be fed and changed.
Eilish is resourceful, brave, and fiercely determined to protect her children, even dodging sniper bullets to visit her injured son in hospital. She clings desperately to hope. Because she cannot come to terms with abandoning her missing loved ones, she initially refuses to be smuggled out of the country. By the time she agrees to leave, she has lost half her family.
Through graphic content and style, Lynch immerses the reader in a world gone mad. His diction is lyrical and dark. The absence of paragraph breaks and lack of quotation marks to indicate direct speech capture Eilish’s lived experience. The rapid succession of events is reflected in rapidly moving sentences. Reality is blurred; dialogue is filtered; nothing seems real. The atmosphere is breathless, claustrophobic, and terrifying. Eilish has no breathing space, no time to get a solid footing, barely recoiling from one catastrophe before being thrust into another. She is powerless to arrest the daily shrinkage of her world. Her inability to get closure on the whereabouts of her loved ones realistically reflects the heart-wrenching reality of those who survive. She is at the mercy of others, especially when she tries to escape with her surviving children. Her journey, described in harrowing detail, echoes the journey thousands of refugees take to escape persecution from their totalitarian governments in their war-torn lands.
This is not an easy read. But it is an essential one. Paul Lynch brilliantly captures the lives of those experiencing the violence and terror of totalitarian regimes. His song of grief at human suffering is a forceful and eloquent plea for the empathy and compassion due to those currently living the nightmare and those trying to escape it.