Book review: Booker-shortlisted Prophet Song a nightmarish wail against totalitarianism
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Irish novelist Paul Lynch is the author of Prophet Song, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023.
PHOTO: JOEL SAGET, ONEWORLD PUBLICATIONS
Prophet Song
By Paul Lynch amzn.to/462Asbu
Fiction/Oneworld Publications/Paperback/320 pages/$24.84/Amazon SG (
4 stars
As in Prague-born novelist Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), someone must have falsely accused Larry Stark – a senior trade unionist at the Teachers’ Union of Ireland – for he was arrested one dark night.
But unlike Kafka’s focus on the bureaucratic labyrinth his protagonist navigates, Irish author Paul Lynch turns his attention to Larry’s family, who gets left behind after his arbitrary arrest with no recourse to the law.
Larry’s wife, microbiologist Eilish, is the mother of four children and the caretaker for her elderly father.
When Larry disappears, her rage against the totalitarian system soon melts into despair as she is forced to confront the state’s endless intrusions into her family life.
In his fifth novel, Lynch’s prose is seductively dense and self-consciously opaque, if only to convey scientist Eilish’s disintegrating reality and crushing unfamiliarity with her new way of life.
This, too, is a sly commentary on the declining trust in scientific language.
Accustomed to democratic life, Eilish can only feel that her experience “is false, or exchanged somehow, the memory belongs to some other people in some other country, she has seen it countless times on TV”.
Like Kafka’s absurdist fiction, Lynch’s Prophet Song is more atmospheric and psychological than driven primarily by an unfolding plot.
Some may find the thick language and mercurial syntax initially disorienting, but once a reader is lured into the hypnotic rhythms of Lynch’s prose, it becomes easier to admire his masterful control of Eilish’s drifting state.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
It is not so clear that this is a futuristic or dystopian novel, as Lynch convincingly renders his world as if it were unfolding in the present.
His uncanny realism powers much of the book’s scenes that are rooted in Ireland and, more terrifyingly, in the minds of the Starks.
He conjures the vast emotional world of paranoid, pitiable Eilish often through loss of bodily autonomy and oppressive references to darkness. “Her mouth opens but no sound comes out, she has been thrown free of the body to become a single black thought, the thought intensifying, expanding darkly until it has swallowed all matter.”
As her 17-year-old son Mark gets called for national service, and her other children blame her for Larry’s disappearance, a line that her sister who lives in Canada tells her becomes an unwanted prophecy: “History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”
It is often devastating for the reader to find oneself in the deepest corners of Eilish’s mind, but this is the exact reason Lynch’s book also resonates as a profoundly empathetic portrait of a disintegrating family in an unprecedented regime change.
Combining political fiction with family drama, Lynch lays bare the ways authoritarian language seeps into the average person’s psyche.
Prophet Song is a full-bodied, nightmarish wail against this age’s totalitarian tendencies.
If you like this, read: Blindness by Jose Saramago (Mariner Books, 1999, $22.07, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/466Fkwa
This article contains affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.
