“One of the most powerful, beautifully written books I’ve ever read — a transformative experience. If I were a teacher, it would be at the top of my syllabus just to see how many were changed.”
I saw this message on FB, which was posted by a friend whose literary judgment I respect. She was referring to Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Even though it won the Booker Prize last year, this book by an accomplished Irish author had escaped my attention.
I really had no idea what Prophet Song was about when I picked it up from our local library branch. (The turnaround from request to receipt was quick because there was no waiting list for the book.) I was immediately drawn in by the presence of a key character who was the head of the local teachers’ union in a small town in Ireland. The book wastes no time in signaling that something sinister is unfolding when Eilish Stack, a biologist and a mother of four, receives a visit from two members of the new regime’s recently formed secret police wanting to question her husband Larry about his work with the union, organizing opposition to recently implemented repressive policies.
When Larry makes the risky decision to plan a mass protest demonstration, the government responds with brute force and he and many other demonstrators are arrested, killed or simply disappear. Eilish’s efforts to locate her husband are futile. She finds it difficult to grasp that the rule of law which she had assumed was a permanent fixture of her society no longer applies. All the laws of the previous democratic country have evaporated, and ordinary citizens like her are unprotected from the force of a distant anonymous central government.
Because of their association with Larry, Eilish loses her job, her children are ostracized, and the oldest son eventually disappears into a growing army of rebellion. Eilish’s elderly father, who is suffering from cognitive decline and paranoia, refuses to move in with her. Her refusal to abandon him leads Eilish to reject the efforts of her Canadian relatives to help the family flee the country while they can, a decision she and her remaining children pay dearly for.
“…. how could any of us have known what was going to happen. I suppose other people seem to know, but I never understood how they were so certain, what I mean is you could never have imagined it, never in a million years, all that was to happen, and I could never understand those that left, how could they just leave like that, leave everything behind, all that life, all that living, it was absolutely impossible for us to do so at the time and the more I look at it the more it seems there was nothing we could do anyhow, what I mean is there was never any real room for action….you are caught up within such a monstrosity…until one thing leads to another until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do.”
I won’t go into all the twists and turns of the novel’s plot which is told in a single breathless paragraph as the events go hurtling from one nightmarish tragedy to the next. I am not a fan of futuristic fantasy novels, but the power of Lynch’s work is that it is set in a very familiar and convincing present. There’s no escaping the realization that this could really happen. The book was written long before the specter of Trump’s second presidency returned to haunt us, but in this moment when the groundwork is being laid for a future that could wind up looking a lot like the one Lynch has imagined for us, we have to imagine with him what this future might look like in our context and prepare to resist it before its stranglehold has cut off all our oxygen.
Reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch right now is a moral imperative. I know that people shied away from reading books about pandemics during the Covid years, while books about Palestine and Gaza were a turn off for many after October 7th, but this is one you can’t sit out. The stakes are too high. Perhaps packaging the message in fictional form will help the medicine go down in a more palatable way.
