Author:Paul Lynch
It takes something very special for me to write a review of a novel. I read a lot, and as this is at heart not a literary forum, I generally keep my thoughts on the latest Patricia Lockwood (unreadable) or Cormac McCarthy (chewy, a lot of physics) to myself. Occasionally however a novel comes along so remarkable that I just want everybody to read it. Of Lynch’s previous novels I’d read Beyond The Sea, a tale of poverty and survival at sea in South America and admired his prose without feeling that engaged by the subject matter. I couldn’t shake the thought that at heart this was constructed and planned – a series of aesthetic choices rather than necessary.
A Prophet Song is a world away. This is something Lynch has put everything into, a story he absolutely has to tell. Though published in 2023, its relevance has – awfully – only grown over the last two years. His story is set in contemporary Ireland, in which a set of political circumstances have brought into power a far-right party, and from the perspective of a professional middle-class Dublin family the novel charts a country’s descent into civil war.
To step aside for a moment, the idea of civil war in a western democracy is not an easy one to bring off. Alex Garland had a go in his film last year and I thought ended up being pretty defeated by the idea:
Adam Curtis, Michael Sheen and James Graham also had a go last year at an imagined Welsh/English civil war through the experiences of a single family in The Way. It was not a success and very quickly descended into incredulity and unintentional farce.
Lynch’s starting point is not that far from these two unholy messes. A knock on the door of a Dublin house brings Larry, a senior teacher and union official, to his local police station to answer some questions about colleagues. At home his wife Eilish urges him not to make a fuss and keep his head down as the fictional Alliance party suspend the constitution and give the police hugely enhanced powers to question and detain without trial. Larry joins a demo against the actions of the state and is arrested.
So begins Eilish’s nightmare – she cannot find him, no-one knows where he is and it becomes clear he has, along with many others on lists, been disappeared. Eilish, whose belief is that the regime will not last long, is contrasted with her eldest son Mark who rebels after he is called up for military service, teenager Bailey and daughter Molly.
I need to stop telling you about the plot as the full force of this novel, like The Handmaid’s Tale, lies in the the inexorable logic of totalitarian repression and state violence set against the individual capacity for compassion and survival. The more you can follow Eilish’s descent without knowing what is next, the more the novel’s central theme hits home: how we accommodate horror by degrees, rationalising it to ourselves as temporary, bearable and something that happens to other people, and that this reaction is exactly what enables totalitarianism to thrive.
This is a novel that I could only read in short bursts. It’s stressful reading that has you turning the page full of fear and concern for Eilish and her family. After twenty pages I had to turn to something different (Colston Whitehead’s seventies Harlem capers). The entire story happens through Eilish’s eyes – from the changes at her work as party loyalists are promoted to the sheer terror of not knowing where her children are after curfew. The functionaries of the state appear and disappear behind desks, at the door and in hospitals and police stations. Eilish is an utterly convincing creation: fierce in her love for her children and her responsibility for keeping the family together; rational and reasonable in her dealings with the state; and – Lynch is unsparing – with a desire to stay and see it out, to keep the home going for first of all Larry, and then others, to return to.
The tension and claustrophobia from seeing the action unfold entirely through Eilish’s eyes is compounded by Lynch’s closely written prose. There are no paragraphs. There are long sentences and dialogue and description are treated alike without any punctuation. But it all serves to take you further into Eilish’s thoughts and feelings. There is in the end helicopter gunships, people smugglers, militias and airstrikes – but it’s the grounding of all this in the everyday and the personal that, unlike Garland’s film, makes these experiences convincing.
Lynch has said that he was motivated to write the novel by the Syrian civil war and the plight of refugees fleeing it. One of the many questions I’m left with is whether he’s set his novel in contemporary Ireland as a warning to us all that our freedoms and security are more fragile than we think, or to bring something far away right outside.
Length of Read:Medium
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
Is it an enjoyable read? Thought-provoking, illuminating, harrowing at times.
One thing you’ve learned
Not sure I’ve learned anything – the slide into totalitarianism is front and centre at the moment – but it’s as convincing an articulation as I’ve read.
Can a novel change anything? Well it was the biggest selling book in Ireland in 2023, so plenty of people have read it. I’m still thinking about it a week after finishing it. Though I’d love to hear all your thoughts, would be especially interested in how it’s gone down in Ireland.
Thanks for the review. I still remember the part about her going to a wedding and noticing the groom has strange, Celtic tattoos on his arm before he gives an unexpectedly menacing wedding speech: a realisation of how your neighbours are changing.
The Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance similarly imagined a collective breakdown of a Hungarian community into chaos through incantatory long sentences without paragraphs: I wonder if that also anticipated the fragility of communist authority in Hungary?
I agree that it’s absolutely brilliant, and very difficult to get through.
I had the opposite strategy to you; I found that once I was reading it I could barely put it down, but after every break I had a hard time convincing myself to go back to it again. So I read it in large chunks to be able to get through it all…I’m happy I did but it’s not a novel I will ever reread!
I can barely think of it without feeling anxiety, which is an unusual way of knowing that it’s a masterpiece.
I have to be honest and say that I was less convinced about it – good, for sure, but it gripped and moved me less than, for example, to compare it with another dystopian novel, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I can’t remember what it was that I wasn’t quite convinced by; maybe the prose just felt a little too deliberate. Or maybe I just had had my expectations raised too far by the glowing reviews and the Booker Prize win. It was a weak year for the Booker I thought – I read all the shortlist but at least a couple of them were very weak. The two Irish Pauls were the best two, but I’d have given the gong to Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting which was also gripping, and at times unbearably tense, but had a heart and a humour I missed in The Prophet Song.
I also loved Bee Sting but was completely sold on Prophet Song. You are of course totally correct about The Road, but for me the scenario – post nuclear apocalypse- seems to have been hanging over us for my entire lifetime whereas Prophet Song seems scarily today
I’m a big Cormac fan (the Crossing trilogy is just awesome from start to finish) but The Road is a different beast. It’s about what happens to us after the apocalypse has happened. There’s a ‘thing/event’ between us and this world (well characterised in Robert Dickinsons The Tourist which I’m reading now as the NEE, the Near Extinction Event). Prophet Song is about what happens to us tomorrow. I also found The Road bordering on unreadable at times, as if it was the answer to a challenge to write the most depressing novel that had ever been written. It came out in when when our children were very young. What happens – or doesn’t – to Eilish’s children is in many ways the most affecting aspect of Prophet Song.
“The Road” is so unrelentingly bleak I felt a numb sense of relief when I finished it. I’m glad I read it but I haven’t been able to face the film though it can’t possibly be as dark as the book can it?
I thought the film of Civil War was dull as old washing up water and gave up after 40 minutes when nothing had happened, but they were arguing about something in a mini bus I think.
Mrs BB saw the film one wet winters afternoon in Madrid, of all places. I can report that it was excellent but, yes, very bleak, and that we needed a comforting Guinness in the Irish bar opposite the cinema to reassure ourselves that all was not terminally terrible.
Also, Moseley is spot on in his description of a fundamental difference between The Prophet Song and The Road; on reflection, it’s a fairly meaningless comparison.
Wonderful review and I can only echo your sentiments- this is a book that seems to become more prescient with every passing week. I would urge anyone with a love of books to read this one
Yes I really should get around to it. I’ve had a copy of it since it was published but other books keep taking my eye and it sits neglected in my tbr. I’m engaged upon Philip Pullman’s final volume in his Book of Dust trilogy and Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn at present maybe when I finish one or other of those I’ll finally get it read.
How is the Barbara Pym, PS? I read Excellent Women a few months back and very much enjoyed it. It was the first of hers that I’ve read and I’ve been considering which one to read next. I haven’t been considering Folio in Autumn as I understand it was her 70s “comeback” novel which is a bit more melancholy than her 50s work.
Melancholy is most apt. I’m enjoying it. I wasn’t really sure what to expect except in a very broad sense as this is the first Barbara Pym novel I’ve read. I’ve amassed quite a few over the years but neglected to read them up until now. I felt I needed a change from my usual fare so I narrowed the choice down to this or some Elizabeth Taylor, the Pym won out.
Required reading for anyone who isn’t taking the rise of Reform (and populists everywhere) seriously, or who thinks migrants are just coming across the sea on a jolly.
I read it last year and it has stayed with me, and I hope our reasonably progressive society would not be easily turned. The almost instant dismissal of intellectual giant Conor MacGregor from our recent presidential campaign showed that we are not yet ready to elect xenophobic sex offenders to public office. There is a small but vocal cohort of nasty bigots who have the support of the likes of Yaxley Lennon, but so far their growth has been small, thankfully. There was a troubling development this past week when some people were arrested after a right-wing extremist plot to attack a mosque in Galway was discovered.
My sister’s book club had reviewed this and it was afterwards passed to me with a couple of Richard Osman’s efforts. I can see why it has received the acclaim, unlike The Thursday Murder Club -why anyone wants to read such as? Prophet Song will appeal to “end of the world is nigh” types, The Book Club preferred Richard.
and there was me thinking the thread was a discussion on this
I’ll get my coat…
I enjoyed it very much. The most ‘difficult’ part for me, was, as noted above, the lack of punctuation, paragraphs and chapters. Often I had to re-read sentences to understand them. Exciting and scary is how I remember it. Books and films are always scary to me if children are in danger.