The political becomes intensely personal in the brilliant book, Prophet Song, which has just won the Booker Prize for 2023. The dark allegorical story shows us a dystopian version of Ireland in the near future with a populist right-wing government at the helm. While set in the island country, it reflects multiple political realities around the world, and how the present state of affairs in one place could well be the past or future of another. And the prophet song at the end alludes to the cyclical nature of how life plays out.
Eilish Stack finds her ordinary, happy life horrifyingly disrupted when her husband is picked up for questioning by the secret police. As she waits for him to return, first with hope and later with futile helplessness, she has a greater task at hand. She needs to tend to and protect her family of four, which includes a baby. She has to check in on her father, who is slowly slipping into dementia. Besides, there are other practical matters to attend to: cling onto her job as a senior microbiologist as best she can because food has to be put on the table. Her house, first vandalised by thugs, and later ravaged by bombs, must still be kept going. And, amid of all this, she has to deal with the fallout—physical and mental—of the events taking place in the country.
Paul Lynch’s totalitarian government follows the same rulebook that all such dispensations in real-life do. Freedoms are chipped away incrementally; ownership of institutions are changed and replaced with lackeys; the flow of information is controlled; media is coerced into servility; the judiciary is silenced; people are branded as subversive or terrorists before disappearing, or being jailed. The silence of the state is wielded as both carrot and stick.
As it happens when people are squeezed relentlessly, the hardship and pain become unbearable, and the fear of authority is conquered, there is an attempt to fight back. With his freedom trampled on and his future in tatters, Eilish’s eldest son joins the resistance movement. Fighting back, however, is not an option the mother has. She has to keep her head down, simply to safeguard her family. As that family gets fragmented, she puts up a formidable front to stave off the inevitable.
The depiction of a people under occupation is one that grabs at the reader’s throat and lodges itself there. Eilish makes the strongest impression, but all the characters are drawn in a manner that stays with the reader. One travels with Eilish as she goes from living a happy, mundane life to waiting, at the end, to escape to a better place in an inflatable boat across treacherous seas. In her, the reader sees many citizens, who are suddenly forced to turn refugees. The children are portrayed as distinctive characters, who deal, in different ways, with the turbulence that engulfs them.
At one stage, Lynch talks of the inherited trauma a baby, born in such times, will manifest while growing into adulthood, a passage that verily breaks the reader’s heart.
It is a sardonic look at freedom, at free will. There are long sentences; there are no paragraph breaks; it is one continuous outpour, and this adds to the pervasive feeling of dread and anxiety, which underpins the story. The language is protean, lyrical and keenly perceptive. In one place, Eilish observes that the “dawn has come and yet the day has fled, she can see this now, how the light that makes insubstantial the dark, is false and it is night that remains true and unshaken”.
Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Yemen, the Troubles all come to the reader’s mind inevitably, inexorably. Prophet Song is bound to be compared to books by George Orwell, Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy. In an interview, Lynch had said that he is always trying to alert the reader to the moment, trying to articulate the passing moment; he does this exceedingly well. In fact, one wonders if this book can be called dystopian at all in light of the violent anti-immigrant fueled arson and rioting in Dublin. Or when one after the other, countries in Europe and elsewhere elect right-wing governments. Or when freedoms are obliterated with nary a protest.
This is a cautionary tale. Beware, it seems to say, do not take your liberty for granted. As the prophet’s song says at the end, somebody’s hell in another country could, in time, be your hell, too. Bertolt Brecht’s famous paragraph is quoted at the beginning of the book; the one on singing about the dark times in the dark times. Prophet Song, then, is the song for our present times, although it is more lament.
‘It is a sardonic look at freedom, at free will. There are long sentences; there are no paragraph breaks; it is one continuous outpour, and this adds to the pervasive feeling of dread and anxiety, which underpins the story.’