Title: Prophet Song
Author: Paul Lynch
Genre: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 978-0861546459
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Publication Date: 2023
Publisher Description: On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.
Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times.
Literary Atelier Review: The first thing to keep in mind about Paul Lynch's excellent, prize-winning novel is that this is not a dystopia. This is speculative fiction. Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, everything which happens in this novel has happened somewhere in the world many times before.
By setting the political crisis in Ireland Lynch invites his audience to imagine events we know well from news reports on far flung, seemingly 'less stable', societies, to a Western European nation.
At the talk he gave at the Internaionales Literatur Festival Berlin, which I attended on 14th September 2024 Lynch confirmed this, saying he wanted to show through Eilish how the circumstances of political upheaval, war and displacement could happen anywhere and to anyone. One of the clever approaches to this book is to not name exactly what type of political ideology has taken over modern day Ireland and begun its decent into a murderous totalitarian regime. To do so would have perhaps resulted in some readers missing the key message of the novel and instead led to an over analysis of how accurate it was to imagine that this or that political doctrine could resort to such methods.
The truth is anywhere at any time people who live under democracy and the rule of law and find themselves slipping into the terror depicted in Prophet Song.