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Prophet Song
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A Review of ‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch
Reviewed by: David Longman, November 2023
Paul Lynch’s novel ‘Prophet Song’ is an alarming story. It is also disturbing if we think only in terms of refugees as ‘incomers’ and do not acknowledge the dislocation that stalks us all. Those of us who live in relatively well-off Western Europe free from tanks, bombs and rampant armies would do well to heed the warning in this story. In Lynch’s telling the dark reality of totalitarianism lies just the other side of a knock at our own front door. If, or perhaps more likely when, that knock comes it may announce our own chaotic transformation into refugees who, losing everything and everyone to political insanity and violence, are forced helplessly to the sea or to some border in search of a less dangerous safety.
Prophet Song cannot be read merely as a literary dystopia for that label makes fictions out of truths, insulating them in an imagined world as satire or commentary. Set in the contemporary Republic of Ireland, a striking scenario but one that has relevant history, the novel relies on well crafted, dramatically paced writing that draws the reader relentlessly to a finale without closure. This is a dystopia of the real. This is no Oceania but Dublin, or London, or Cardiff, or Edinburgh and as this is written it is surely Gaza, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh or one of many flash points of inhuman militarised political strategy. It is relevant to all of us who, like this reviewer, is only hesitantly confident that tomorrow will be much like today, free from the pernicious consequences of now fashionable norms of dysfunctional government.
Lynch does not waste our time investigating what brings the reader to the unhappy brutality of an unnamed dictatorship that sweeps Ireland. There is no need. The reader is ready. We know how it happens, how the decline of democratic principles leave us little more than a few parliamentary votes from chaos (Democracy in deline…) All that matters, and all that Lynch’s characters know, is that there is a newly enacted ‘Emergency Powers Act’ and a new ruling party, an ominously named National Alliance now armed with sweeping powers of arrest, warrantless detention and teh cancellation of habeas corpus. A tipping point has been reached and it takes but a few pages to sweep away any lingering sense that this can’t happen here!
Lynch begins his story without preamble. There comes that knock on the door setting off the deepening trauma of Eilish Stack and her family of four children, including a one year old baby, and her trades union husband Larry, a senior official of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland who, as the story opens, is engaged in organising national action. Eilish faces two detectives from the Garda National Security Bureau, a new hard-arse unit remodelled out of its predecessor. They want to see Larry ‘just for a conversation’. He is out. He should call them.
Working to exhaustion Larry is confident of his legal rights even as Eilish’s anxiety slowly grows and with her the reader’s own sense that this is not looking good. (Something vaguely similar, a prequel perhaps, is already at work in England where the DfE monitors and manipulates social media discussions between education professionals). Larry is remains sanguine not yet alarmed by the rapid changes thwarting the established rules of democratic reason. Thus he goes to a meeting and endures a sinister conversation. Sedition is implied.
Soon after, barely twenty pages in and as the political pressure on the trade union mounts, Larry disappears along with other Union officials. He simply does not come home one day and is never seen again. Throughout, Eilish never relinquishes her hope for his return but as time passes her memories of him become more fragmentary, less defined, but the passion and the hurt bite deeply. She struggles too with the guilt that she must lie to her frightened children in order to convince them that he will return and that ‘things’ will return to normal.
Hearsay has it that Larry has been interned along with hundreds of others but later we learn that this was always a fiction. They have all disappeared and no lawyer can help, themselves becoming targets of abduction. Eilish’s desperation and increasingly fruitless hope intensify taking as she struggles to maintain family life, to ensure her children get to school fed and watered, protected them from the impact of increasing oppression and threat, while nursing her new baby and caring for her widowed father living across the city, slipping irritably into dementia.
The tragic trajectory of Eilish’s family life becomes increasingly steep and rapid. Writing consistently and resolutely from her point of view Lynch delves in to the psychology of hope. Essentially this is an internal monologue but the reader is seeing what Eilish sees, sharing her endurance, without becoming metaphysical or seeking deeper motivations. This is daily life driven by events and Eilish’s reactions and adaptations to them. Her father’s obvious dementia counterpoints her own frustrations with the increasing disorder in what was a busy, sometimes challenging, family life and the reader is forced to watch as the memory of her life as it was is drowned squalls of survival while still struggles to negotiate the awkward, sometimes angry, exchanges with her children and the necessities of a new baby. The shift from a habitual family life to one lived under dictatorship is convincing, made more ghastly because it erupts in a supposedly peaceful and democratic society, like mine or like yours.
Although before these events they had planned a family holiday in Canada to stay with Eilish’s sister the family’s passports cannot now be renewed. Her application is denied because she too is now deemed a security risk. Now trapped with no legal means to leave the country, she soon loses her job because the biotech company she works for is taken over by Party appointees. She is not the only one to be fired. Her eldest son, Mark, about to leave school and embark on the career path to become a doctor, is conscripted into the NAP defence force. He escapes and joins the rebel army. He too is never seen again and although his survival is more ambiguous than Larry’s there have already school protests against conscription that resulted in the detention of four young students and their subsequent state sanctioned murder.
The tension and the pace of the story telling increases. Eilish’s car is smashed by hooded thugs and the sly slogan ‘Traiter’ [sic] is daubed on the body work. Civil war breaks out and Dublin is under siege. Now the motifs of political war multiply in a louder screeching key: the street fighting is familiar to Irish history while the barrel bombs dropped over Eilish’s neighbourhood an innovation of the Assad terror in Syria, and the long distance murder-by-sniping of civilians trying to find food an echo of the siege on Sarajevo.
Even this life of ours with all all its distractions, irritations and its injustices may seem to be a haven of opportunity and relative freedom but Lynch shatters that complacency. The reader is challenged not to weep when Elish’s second born son, twelve years old, injured in a bomb blast but still heroically digging aid entombed victims disappears after she single-mindedly drives him to the nearest hospital that is now several miles across a city of rubble and checkpoints and he is taken off to a surgical ward. The next day, after hours of agonised search she is directed to a morgue where she finds his body, without fingernails and a bullet in his knee.
There is little more to say. This story, to use a well-worn cliché, is visceral. It is recounted in a realist, almost documentary style with filmic elements – the narrative frequently cuts to new scenes with no visual markers. A contemporary audience reared on television and podcasts will have no difficulty with this. Some might quibble as to how it is possible amidst such destruction and chaos to make more or less routine use of mobile phones but eventually all such contemporary normalities as phones and cars are abandoned to the destruction. There are, too, some interesting if somewhat unusual linguistic flourishes – for example characters don’t just put their coats on, they ‘sleeve’ them – which might jar with more pedantic grammarians.
None of this diminishes the linguistic drive that thrusts this story forward although it never really ends. How can it? It reminds us that no matter how secure, how safe we might feel today we are all, potentially, refugees, living not in an imaginary dystopia but in an all too real world of psychotic politics. A final irony perhaps is that the setting of this novel in Dublin is also the namesake of a key EU regulation within the Common European Asylum System known as the Dublin Regulation that governs EU State responsibilities. Refugee status under this has become known as ‘being Dublined‘.
Take heed.