By James Ley
FICTION
Prophet Song
Paul Lynch
Oneworld, $32.99
There is something a bit last century about Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, which won the Booker Prize last month. The novel’s dark vision of Irish society sliding into totalitarianism has an antique Orwellian quality, recalling as it does the old Stalinist model of state oppression, in which the rights of ordinary citizens are summarily removed and police start rounding up dissidents.
Paul Lynch celebrates his novel Prophet Song winning the Booker Prize.Credit:
The details of how and why this situation has arisen are sketchy. There are some vague early references to a “big lie” and an apparently spurious emergency declaration, but the novel never really explains who is in power or why they are doing what they are doing. Though it is set in a version of the near-present (characters have mobile phones and internet connections), it makes little attempt to address, let alone capture, the peculiar tenor of the anti-democratic forces that have convulsed democracies around the globe over the last decade or so.
In the early stages of the novel, there is no strong sense of the normalised chaos of demagogic populism, conspiracy theories, disinformation and nativist hysteria, more of a puzzled awareness that something has gone terribly wrong. One of the few hints at the ideological agenda of the “regime” is at the very beginning when Larry, husband of the protagonist Eilish Stark, disappears into indefinite detention, having been arrested for his activities as a trade unionist.
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The effect of this indistinctness is to give the dystopian premise an abstracted formality. Prophet Song takes as its backdrop a generic authoritarianism, monolithic and anonymous, that seems to have been imposed on a supine society.
The novel presents its nondescript political context from the harried perspective of Eilish as she deals with the inertia of domesticity. Though she is naturally concerned about the fate of her missing husband, she still has to feed the baby, get the kids to school on time, and look after her increasingly senile father. She strives to fulfil these familial responsibilities even as the situation worsens, the nation tips into civil war, and the streets outside her Dublin home become a battleground.
The collision between kitchen-sink realism and political dystopia is the thematic key to Prophet Song. There are numerous references to the sanctuary of the home being invaded by unwelcome forces and many moments of contemplative gazing out the window at the gathering darkness. As the novel unfolds, the naive notion that the domestic realm might be quarantined from the disruptive violence of the wider world is inexorably broken down.
On a broad conceptual level, then, Prophet Song is relatively straightforward. Lynch wants to suggest that the sense of security many people take for granted is a fragile illusion. He is less concerned with the reasons a society might run off the rails than the inevitably tragic consequences when it does. A great deal thus depends on his ability to dramatise the escalating sense of tension and the disintegration of old certainties, which he does somewhat unevenly, particularly in the first half of the novel.
Some of this unevenness can be attributed to the idiosyncrasies of Lynch’s prose style. Prophet Song is composed in spliced run-on sentences, presented without paragraph breaks. At its best, the technique gives the writing an immersive quality and a propulsive energy. But the heightened tone often proves less effective when it comes to reflective passages and more mundane forms of exposition.
Lynch has something of a weakness for laboured poeticisms and pompous diction, not to mention the grating habit of noun-verbing that has become the bane of so much contemporary writing. Prophet Song is the kind of novel where phones and alarms don’t ring they “bell”, cigarettes are “flamed” rather than lit, birds at dawn are said to be “sounding the quiet”, and so forth. This sort of thing is supposed to signal the author’s serious literary intentions, but mostly it just comes across as affectation.
And yet when Lynch’s prose works, it really works. Prophet Song redeems itself in its shattering final scenes, narrated in an irresistible torrent of language. Its closing pages not only have the courage to carry the novel’s cruel logic to its devastating conclusion; they evoke grim historical ironies with implications far beyond its immediate setting.
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