November 27, 2023
“Prophet Song,” which won Britain’s Booker Prize on Sunday, describes how the fibers of political decay get caught in the lungs: the wracking cough of tyranny precedes the illness, the horrible death. But rather than survey the whole body of governmental putrefaction, Lynch focuses on the travails of one woman struggling to protect her family in Dublin.
Eilish Stack is a respected microbiologist, a mother and the wife of a union leader. After a long day of work, she craves only a spot of peace and renewal. But if you remember the first line of “1984” — “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” — you’ll hear the opening of “Prophet Song” as a sepulchral echo: “The night has come and she has not heard the knocking.”
That knocking in the nighttime, the implacable salutation of the KGB and security agents the world over, is the first in an uninterrupted series of perversions of the social order. The two plainclothes men who ask Eilish about her husband are polite and solicitous. “It’s nothing to worry about, Mrs. Stack,” one says. “We don’t want to be taking up any more of your time.”
The moment they leave, though, Eilish realizes they’ve left something behind, something that runs as fast as Lynch’s unstoppable phrases: “This feeling now that something has come into the house, she wants to put the baby down, she wants to stand and think, seeing how it stood with the two men and came into the hallway of its own accord, something formless yet felt. She can sense it skulking alongside her as she steps through the living room.”
Eilish is a carefully-drawn portrait of affection and grit. She knows and doesn’t know what the officers want with her husband, Larry. “You hear the talk,” she tells him later that night, “the kind of things that are said to be going on these past few months.” Since the Emergency Powers Act was passed, the whole country has been itching with anxiety. But Larry imagines his work with the teachers union can’t possibly be labeled seditious. “There are still constitutional rights in this country,” he insists. And yet the next labor demonstration is violently broken up by police. Larry is detained without access to counsel or visitors — and then he’s disappeared.
Lynch keeps the details of this national emergency vague. We hear the helicopter blades and the explosions, but mostly we see “the wheel of disorder coming loose” as it’s reflected in Eilish’s eyes. And why not? The tune may differ, but every authoritarian regime sings the same lyrics: Subversive forces inciting discord, unrest and hatred against the state must be destroyed. Eilish sees that agenda from the truly domestic side. “Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers sinking under the water,” she thinks. “Sons and daughters, sisters and brothers disappearing down, down into the down.” The gall of oppression shocks her. “The state is supposed to leave you alone,” she says to her powerless lawyer, “not enter your house like an ogre, take a father into its fist and gobble him, how can I even begin to explain this to the kids, that the state they live in has become a monster?”
But as Eilish struggles to shelter her children from what’s happening throughout Ireland, Lynch keeps his tongue on the chill worming in. “A strange, unsettled air has filled the house,” he writes. “Some unity within the family has begun to unravel.” “Prophet Song” is, among many things, a record of the toxic effects of stress on young people, who can’t be sustained long on a diet of lies, evasions and brittle cheeriness. Eilish worries that her baby may be infected for life by the miasma of fear. Her eldest son is enraged by the shame of doing nothing. Her 14-year-old daughter stops eating. And Eilish still has to keep tabs on her irascible father who insists on staying in his own home as his mind fades away.
To borrow a phrase from Hemingway, the moral bankruptcy of fascism arrives in two ways: gradually and then suddenly. But no matter how horrific events in this novel become — and they become unspeakably horrific — Eilish clings to the fantasy that this untenable situation can be managed, that the brutality of a police state can be effectively avoided or assuaged.
Every page vibrates with the alarm: GET OUT! But Eilish’s faith in the future becomes a kind of curse. Every time she’s told to take her children and flee the country, it’s impossible not to relish the satisfying pity of foreknowledge, the same incredulity we feel whenever we read those sepia tales of oppressed people who tarried too long in burning regions.
Lynch rips away that easy condescension. He knows free will turns out to be a political fiction once people are snagged in the gears of despotism. “One thing leads to another thing,” he writes, “until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do.”
Which is not a bad description of reading this relentless novel. It’s written in the grammar of dread. The sentences cascade from one to the next without so much as a moment’s breath. And with no paragraph breaks to cling to, every page feels as slippery as the damp walls of a torture chamber. I have not read such a disturbing novel since Richard Flanagan’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” which won the Booker Prize almost 10 years ago.
With tens of millions of Americans cheering on a “very proud election denier” skating toward the White House on Nazi catchphrases, “Prophet Song” may not be the holiday pick-me-up you need right now. Indeed, even though Lynch started writing this several years ago, the plot often feels as though he constructed it from recent headlines. Even as he accepted the Booker Prize in London, smoke was still rising from the mayhem lit by anti-immigrant thugs and far-right leader Geert Wilders was savoring his victory in the Netherlands’ parliamentary elections.
But maybe this dystopia is exactly what’s required to rattle us from complacency, from the comforting illusion that fascism only happens far away or long ago. “The end of the world is always a local event,” Lynch writes near the conclusion of this prophetic masterpiece. “It comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
Prophet Song
By Paul Lynch
Atlantic Monthly Press. 309 pp. $26
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