Tea Kettle (1914) | Oleksandr Bohomazov / CC BY-SA 4.0
On one level, the premise of Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023), the recent Booker-winning novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, is simple enough: It’s about the existential dilemmas a mother faces in an authoritarian state. But on every other level, Prophet Song exceeds the expectations of a dystopian tale. Instead of locating it in a speculative Orwellian setting, Lynch places it in modern-day Republic of Ireland. Uncannily immersive, the novel penetrates the attending states of confusion, fear, and panic so viscerally that it transcends the logic of narrative.
Lynch’s Prophet Song plunges us into a world of inward terror. The novel’s pacing and prose are intentionally claustrophobic. There is no distinction between voiced and unvoiced speech. It is difficult to separate what is thought from what is said, or what is really happening from what might be happening. Unlike George Orwell’s 1984, which showed readers how a super-state could impose mind control on its citizens, and to which Prophet Song is a worthy successor, Lynch’s novel is not an allegory. Instead, Lynch pulls off a remarkable feat of transference. You come as close as you can to feeling what the characters feel (and what our most vulnerable neighbors feel today)—mortal dread.
The novel’s protagonist, Eilish, lives with her four children and her husband, Larry, in Dublin. The city is under a state of exception imposed by the government’s exercise of “Emergency Powers,” for reasons that are never explained. Eilish simply has to live with their onerous effects—beginning with Larry’s arrest for leading a teacher’s union protest and his subsequent disappearance.
His extra-legal banishment gives Eilish both a reason to stay—Larry might walk back in the door at any moment—and a reason to leave: Larry’s disappearance, she realizes, is part of a growing pattern of erasures. Meanwhile, the water in their home’s faucets turns brown and cups of tea, once a dependable source of comfort, taste musty; her local butcher ignores her while serving other customers; and a wedding becomes an occasion for a forced display of political fealty, effectively excommunicating Eilish from her extended family.
The novel’s events begin innocuously enough: A party holding extreme nativist convictions wins an election. But events decline precipitously. Eilish senses it when she runs into Rory, an old acquaintance:
He is quick to speak about old times and she watches his face hurrying him along with her eyes, a bus pulls away expelling hot diesel smoke and Rory steps back, his scarf stirring to reveal the party pin on the lapel of his jacket. She takes a step backwards, swallows and closes her eyes, Rory smiling with his teeth.
Feeling the social rupture in even this casual exchange, Eilish becomes desperate for signs of continuity with the world as she knew it. She observes that “trees keep counting the time by ringing the time in their wood.” And later, that there is “memory in the weather.” These things cannot be defeated. They defy the logic of her increasingly fragile state.
Looking for a paint scraper to remove the graffiti that vandals have painted on her house, Eilish “meets instead her humiliation as though it were on the shelf before her, the shame and pain and grief moving freely through her body.” As aggressions pile up—among other violations, their car and bikes are destroyed—her confusion grows. She drifts between feeling she has agency and hope and feeling disoriented and drained.
Increasingly, Eilish finds herself defenseless—even as she must defend her family. She continues to send the children to school, stubbornly maintaining the importance of soon-to-be-obsolete rites of passage like playing hockey and getting into university. When her daughter Molly accuses her of doing nothing to get Larry back, Eilish says, “Sometimes not doing something is the best way to get what you want.” Yet she does wear the white scarf that marks her as a dissident—and gets her fired. In her vacillations, Lynch captures that uncanny state of being simultaneously aware and in disbelief when reality is no longer solid.
As things continue to deteriorate, Eilish’s maternal force, her protests of “I am your mother,” are unable to keep her family intact. Her oldest son Mark receives a notice to report to national service. She watches him burn the letter with a feeling of foreboding: “The lighter clicks an amber flame that tastes the corner of the paper then forms a black mouth.” The metaphor for the state’s destructive appetite takes on a more literal cast when Mark leaves to fight the new regime, and, like his father, is never seen again. Eilish’s anxiety is further ratcheted up when her 12-year-old son is abducted from his school. After an agonizing search, she finds him in a state morgue, bearing unmistakable marks of torture and murder. Utterly devastated, she has no time to mourn: She must care for her father, daughter, and toddler amidst accelerating assaults.
Lynch’s point in setting his nightmare in contemporary Dublin, in a nation that today seems securely democratic, is to make palpable the possibility that a domestic Armageddon could occur anywhere, any time. As he remarked in a PBS interview, “The civilized world is a thin veneer, so fragile and easily lost.” He claims, however, not to be writing a polemic, tempting as it is to think he’s holding up a mirror to any number of autocracies. Instead, he calls Prophet Song a story of grief. It is a story about the pain that follows when society segregates those it deems normal from those it condemns and terrorizes as abnormal.
Terror isn’t an abstraction when you’re tensed for the next assault, when it infiltrates the lives of your family and your colleagues. Just ask around in the United States, where firings, deportations, and even disappearances are becoming routine. It’s hard to find someone unaffected, if only indirectly. In fact, it is the indirect effects that are the most insidious. They spur pre-emptive censorship and equivocation between compliance with, and rejection of, the new status quo. This is a tightrope act that Eilish ultimately refuses to perform.
Lynch’s novel does more than prophesize an apocalypse wrought by authoritarian muzzle and muscle. Unlike 1984, which afforded readers the luxury of distance from reality, Prophet Song is rooted in the everyday. It is less a portrait of the workings of tyranny than of what being tyrannized feels like, smells like, looks like, sounds like, even tastes like. Its characters are as recognizable as our own kith and kin, as recognizable as us. This is its potency. Prophet Song makes terror intimate.
