Review: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Prophet Song begins mid-scene, with the proverbial knock at the door in the middle of the night. Union man Larry Stack is taken in for questioning by members of the Garda National Service Bureau, a new law enforcement agency created by an Emergency Powers Act in response to indeterminate security threats. Larry has attracted the attention of the GNSB (an acronym fit for secret police if ever there was one) for planned strikes. He’s aware of the danger; others are already disappearing. His wife Eilish frets over his involvement, vacillates between denial, action and her determination to keep the family under the radar. But as the authoritarian regime deepens its hold on the state one of the lessons of Prophet Song is that there is no way of escaping the radar’s gaze. Eilish is left to look after her four children and ageing father, keeping them together best she can, as life becomes first uncomfortable and then increasingly untenable as war breaks out.

Dublin is the setting, although never named, nor is the year or decade, but it is clearly now. The source of the security threat is similarly vague; the vagueness is the point. It has that in common that in common with previous Irish Booker-winner Milkman by Anna Burns, although there the lack of detail felt more specific and necessary. Prophet Song operates on two ideas. First, that the violence and authoritarianism that the Stack family experiences can happen to anyone; it can even happen (!) to white people. Second, that those pathways are already underway in some Western countries. It’s meant to be a this-could-happen-to-me jolt, a call to vigilance against the creep of fascism. It has a lot in common with Russell T. Davies nail-biting and absurd series Years And Years, sadly minus the passionate gay sex while missiles soar over the UK. Prophet Song is mostly successful, evoking a range of emotional responses, and its ending is undeniably powerful and pointed, concluding at the moment when Europe’s leaders abandon empathy for others. Because the context for Prophet Song exists purely outside the covers, what’s contained within is simply a survival story, a posing of the what-would-I-do questions that make the genre so compelling.

One of the abominations of war is that it reduces the infinite complexity of human experience to survival. That lack of complexity is apparent in the bones of Lynch’s novel, in the incessant imagery of light and dark, representing on the one hand hope and life, and death and authoritarianism on the other:

Watching the light now as if broods upon the street, a slow pulsation that gives to sudden clarity then dims, thinking about what lies hidden, seeing that what is revealed in the soft blooming light is the everyday occurring, the centre of the middle charged with the ordinary…

So bathed in this metaphor is Prophet Song that I think it would be possible to read the narrative purely through this immaterial imagery, with the human drama serving as mere setting. Perhaps there’s some power here in reducing life to its physics, the world to its most mathematical, but it makes for a bleak, nihilistic mood.

That’s not to say that there aren’t moments that inspire terror and sadness, but also hope and even amusement. There are. The Stack’s one-way journey into hell is harrowing in the extreme. Tension is introduced (the disappearance of husband and later her son) and never resolved, because war destroys resolution. Such drive leads to an immersive and gripping reading experience. The novel’s most interesting idea is to consider how authoritarianism and war reinforce existing gender inequities, as the burden for looking after the family falls ever more heavily on Eilish, putting her through a series of impossible choices, that she nevertheless feels guilt over, while even the youngest men are to be recruited or removed. Lynch excels in the specifics and action of how Eilish and her family survive, and how war and unfreedom distorts imagination.

Gay rating: not gay.