Prophet Song - Paul Lynch

Ironically enough, Paul Lynch's 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song, is the last of the thirteen nominated novels (I did abandon two of them at around the 100-page mark) that I've read. I still find it difficult to understand why Prophet Song was only published in the U.S. after the Booker winner was announced, but that's exactly what Atlantic Monthly Press managed to do with it. And then my library system was slow to purchase enough copies of the novel to meet the demand for it, so it's been a long wait for my turn at this one. But, as it turns out, Prophet Song was well worth the wait.

"We were offered visas, you know, to Australia, and we turned them down, my husband said no, plain and simple, he said it was impossible to go at the time and I suppose he was right, and how could we have known anyhow, how could any of us have known what was going to happen, I suppose other people seemed to know, but I never understood how they were so certain, what I mean is, you could never have imagined it, not in a million years, all that was to happen, and I could never understand those that left, how they could just leave like that, leave everything behind, all that life, all that living..."

Prophet Song is one of the most haunting novels I've read in a long, long time. Whether by design or not, the story's full impact sneaks up on the reader just as gradually as what is happening to the main characters of the novel who do not realize the full extent of what is coming for them and their country (Ireland) until it is much too late to escape without suffering irreparable damage. Luckily for readers, in place of the permanent damage suffered by the fictional Stack family, they get to experience a novel every bit as powerful  as George Orwell's 1984.

 It all starts for the Stack family on the night that Eilish Stack opens the door to find two officers from Ireland's new secret police force, the GNSB, looking for her husband, a prominent trade unionist suspected by the GNSB of "serving enemies of the state." For Eilish, her husband Larry, and their four children, Ireland's accelerating drift toward a tyrannical government is about to become personal. Eilish is nervous, Larry is in denial about why the police would even want to talk to him, and their children are oblivious to it all. Surely this can't be happening in a country like Ireland, can it? Things like this just don't happen in the West.

But they do happen. And Eilish, even as her two sons (a seventeen-year-old and a twelve-year-old) begin to slip from her grasp, realizes that it is up to her, and only her, to make the right choices if her family is to survive at all. 

At first glance, Prophet Song can be a little intimidating because of the author's densely packed page style. The book is a series of three-or-four-page paragraphs comprised of very long sentences, and the author uses no quotation marks to flag his dialogue. That style, however, works very well here because Lynch is such a precise and clear writer that there is never any doubt about who is speaking or, no matter how long the sentence, what is being said. I found as I began reading the book's last two chapters that I was turning pages as quickly as if I were reading some mass market thriller; I couldn't wait to find out how it was all going to end for Eilish and her children. 

But what I will probably remember longest about Prophet Song is the realization of how true this is today:

"...the world is always ending over and over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore..."

Perhaps it's time that we all take those warnings more seriously.

 

Paul Lynch jacket photo