By P.W. Bridgman
While it is an increasingly distant memory, it is still a very clear one for me (and I expect for many GRB readers). I am referring to the mayhem that often prevails in family life, where the demands of raising young and teenaged children must be met by parents struggling simultaneously to fulfil the requirements of two arduous careers.
There are the lessons and sports events, the driving, the mood swings and conflicts between and among the kids. The nudging and cajoling to get the schoolwork done and the half-hearted policing of screen time. The worries about the company the older ones may be keeping. The stair that needs fixing and the tap that continually drips. The appointments, both missed and kept. The temporary and unpredictable calls for heroics at work. The perpetual challenge of finding ways to share household responsibilities equitably.
On the inside of such maelstroms, it can feel as though just one more request, just one more unexpected crisis in miniature – “The WiFi’s down again, Dad!” – one more anything could bring the entire sorry spectacle crashing to the ground.
In Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel, Prophet Song, this is his principal characters’ daily reality. Larry Stack is the deputy head of the Teachers Union in Ireland. His wife Eilish is a microbiologist with a high-stress position in the corporate world.
Both are beset by incessant and pressing professional demands. They have three bright but unruly teens at different stages in their sullen-hood, and a surprise baby. As if that were not enough, Eilish’s widowed father lives nearby, alone, and suffers from a progressively debilitating dementia. He will, however, brook virtually no interference with his independence.
Somehow, despite all of this, Larry and Eilish together navigate the shoals of the day-to-day. Just barely.
But for the Stack family, it is no ‘last straw’, no crisis in miniature, that disrupts the fragile balance of their pressured lives. What upends everything, rather, is nothing less than the complete disintegration of the civil order in a future Ireland of Paul Lynch’s ominous imagining.
This comes about when a far-right populist party called the National Alliance is elected and forms the government. Citing fictitious threats to national and domestic security, the party moves quickly to suspend civil liberties and establish a deeply repressive security state.
This may sound fanciful – but it is no far-fetched dystopian pastiche. Lynch has written a harrowing novel about credible threats to democracy that are increasingly evident in our modern world. His tale has been chillingly and believably told.
In Prophet Song, through the enactment of a draconian Emergency Powers Act, the National Alliance has suspended the Irish constitution. Government operatives, with the support of the Irish armed forces and the Garda National Services Board (the ‘GNSB’) – a new emanation of the Garda Síochána – have infiltrated public and private institutions, displaced democratic norms and processes and curtailed freedoms at every turn. Officials, colleagues, friends and neighbours have been co-opted, sometimes openly and sometimes covertly. Suspicions abound. Curtains twitch. All semblance of normal living is gradually unseated.
The first direct effect of the National Alliance’s strong-arm tactics felt by the Stack family comes as the Teachers Union that Larry leads prepares for a nation-wide strike and public protest march, expressing teachers’ objection to the party’s ‘reforms’ and their effects on the profession and Irish society in general.
Shortly ahead of the date for the protest, his family receives an unexpected late-evening visit from two Garda attached to the GNSB. They tell Eilish that Larry must come in for questioning. When he does, he is given veiled threats suggesting that it would not be in his or his family’s interests for the strike and protest march to go forward. This all unfolds amidst reports that some junior officials within the Teachers Union have already disappeared and others have been detained and questioned.
The National Alliance sees the march and the threatened Teachers Union strike as a challenge to its newly claimed and newly asserted authority. The party’s calculus is that any such public display of defiance must be crushed, decisively, lest its iron grip on the levers of power be weakened. Given these stakes, Larry agonises over whether or not to proceed with his union’s planned, peaceful insurrection. Standing on principle could come at a very high personal cost. And yet . . .
Larry and Eilish discuss the available options late into the night. She equivocates in her urgings. In the end, with Eilish’s reluctant concurrence, Larry decides that the strike and march must go ahead, gives the affirmative order and joins his colleagues at a mass gathering in Dublin.
As Eilish nervously waits, news begins to filter in about the tactics being employed by the GNSB and Irish military to suppress the union protest – tactics including the use of firearms with live ammunition. There is a bloodbath. The protesters who survive scatter in disarray. Many of them are taken into custody. Larry Stack is never seen again.
While nursing increasingly unrealistic hopes that her husband will eventually resurface unharmed, Eilish strives mightily to preserve what she can of their children’s normal life at home. But the fact that Irish society as a whole is coming apart at the seams does not mean that the quotidian challenges of parenting sometimes wilful and defiant children diminish to make extra room for dealing with the wider national crisis. Not at all. While there are occasional displays of insight and understanding, the teens’ petty preoccupations and demands mostly continue.
Still somehow, under steadily worsening conditions, Eilish manages to uphold, for a time at least, a shaky sense of order and purpose within the household, fuelled largely by her often-repeated belief that the new regime and its authoritarian agenda must ultimately yield to reason and the rule of law. On the long view she is likely correct. As her father says in one of his fleetingly lucid moments:
Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself . . . you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales . . .
But neither Eilish nor the rest of civilised Irish society in Lynch’s masterful novel have the luxury of living by the long view, of waiting out the National Alliance regime. They must address the imperatives of the nightmare of the party’s making in the unravelling, disintegrating present.
Naturally enough, elements within Irish society begin to mobilise resistance to the repressive security state that the majority of voters – beguiled by a disinformation campaign of a sort not unfamiliar to Western democracies today – have brought unwittingly upon their country.
That resistance evolves to armed conflict. The struggle, in the form of open civil warfare, is brought eventually to Eilish’s doorstep. And it is a full and very bloody military engagement, comprising enforced curfews, guerilla tactics, ground attacks and even air assaults.
The eldest of the Stacks’ teen-aged sons declines to cooperate with a plan that Eilish and a family acquaintance have concocted to get him secretly across the border to safety in Northern Ireland. The plan is formed to spare the 18-year-old from being pressed into mandatory military service by the National Alliance. (It needs all the manpower it can muster to quell the rebel insurgence by force.)
The boy wavers but, ultimately, does the precise opposite of Eilish’s wishes. He disappears and joins rebel forces to support their attempts to overthrow the authoritarian regime. He thus disappears for large swaths of time from the novel’s pages. Prophet Song meanwhile chronicles the death spiral that the National Alliance has brought to Ireland’s long-entrenched democratic institutions.
Lynch’s novel documents that death spiral by narrating its wider, societal arc alongside detailed accounts of the price it exacts, moment to moment, within the Stack family, in microcosm as it were. Access to drinkable water becomes insecure. Eilish must sometimes venture across shifting state/insurgent lines to obtain medical treatment for a child or purchase essentials supplies for the family. Sleep is endlessly disrupted by exploding artillery shells, first heard at a distance and then close by.
When word gets out that Eilish and Larry’s eldest son has not reported for conscription into the Irish military, state-sponsored vandals tag the house to identify it as the home of a traitor. As resources become scarce, some merchants succumb to unworthy urges and engage in profiteering, charging cash-strapped citizens multiples of what they once charged for daily necessities. The wedges between opposing elements within Irish society thus grow wider and deeper by the day.
The author’s narration of all these details is riveting and deeply discomfiting for the reader. It is in its vivid depiction of the quotidian effects of Irish society’s disintegration upon its citizens that Prophet Song – a dystopian novel nonpareil – truly excels.
Lynch’s remarkable book succeeds brilliantly in another, but related, way. The somewhat quirky and idiosyncratic form that Lynch’s writing takes in Prophet Song is perfectly commensurate with its subject matter. Decades ago, Canadian communications theorist, Marshall McLuhan, famously argued that ‘the medium is the message’. That is literally true of Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel.
The novel’s content is mirrored, indeed amplified, by Lynch’s sparing use of conventional punctuation and his almost complete abstention from the use of paragraph breaks and other structural features that serve, ordinarily, as stabilising signposts for the reader. Lengthy discursive sentences, strung together serially and often not separated one from the next by full stops, contribute to the helter-skelter sense of dissociation and chaos that those sentences describe.
The text in Prophet Song can traverse several pages with little punctuation and no paragraph breaks whatsoever, accelerating the gyrating momentum of the narrative and creating a kind of vertigo that one might expect to experience when all of the landmarks and signposts that guide orderly societies bound to the social contract are swept aside by a juggernaut government. The equation Lynch has fashioned in his writing between form and content is pure genius.
A similar effect is achieved by Lynch’s use of sometimes eccentric, but always gripping, forms of expression. For example, while Larry Stack is being questioned by a Garda about the forthcoming mass protest and strike of the members of his Teacher’s Union, he hears footsteps outside the interview room. They “pass down the long corridor and are absolved by a closing door.” Absolved by a closing door.
A couple of other examples –
Eilish must use her wiles in order to try to find her way through a bureaucratic labyrinth to her younger teenaged son who is said to be in hospital receiving treatment for injuries suffered during a bombardment. She tells whatever lies are necessary to get her past obstructionist officials:
Eilish cleans and plasters the cuts on her feet and walks through the ward in paper slippers preparing a face for the nurse, recalling the lie she has told the admissions clerk, the poisonous flower hanging from her mouth…
And, while her house is under siege:
She is suddened into the dark room, the awareness cold and quick in the blood that something has struck the glass door downstairs . . .
. . . [Her daughter] begins to breathe in sawing exertions, her eyes loose with panic.
. . . what Carole said cannot be true, nobody knows what is true anymore, telling herself that what she feels isn’t grief [at the creeping realisation that Larry is dead], it has to be something else, grievance is grief dressed in the clothes of hope.
These unusual usages contribute, in some alchemical way, to the reader’s feeling of being off balance and disoriented, just as Eilish has been forced off balance and become disoriented by events unfolding around her. The sensation is one of being caught up and spun about wildly within the dizzying vortex of the novel’s deeply unsettling plot.
Prophet Song’s depiction of the subjugation of Irish society is further enriched by its spot-on portrayals of the ready acceptance, by so many within the state bureaucracy, of their new repressive duties.
The dull, plodding and unquestioning fealty of the bureaucrats to higher authority, however malign, is every bit as essential to the operationalisation of the National Alliance’s far-right political agenda as are the actions of its military.
Lynch’s carefully wrought prose nicely captures the sheer banality of the dutiful bureaucrats’ swift conversion to the National Alliance’s new credos, lending texture to the writing which, elsewhere in the novel, emulates the swirling public confusion and alarm that attends the rapid dismantling of Ireland’s civil rights infrastructure.
Consider this extract from Larry’s interview after being called in for questioning by a GNSB Garda about the looming union protest and strike:
. . . you must understand how this appears to us, your behaviour looks like the conduct of someone inciting hatred against the state, someone sowing discord and unrest—when the consequences of an action affect stability at the level of the state there are two possibilities before us, one is that the actor is an agent working against the interests of the state, the other is that he is ignorant of his actions and acting without the intention of doing so, but either way, Mr Stack, the result in both cases is the same, the person will be serving enemies of the state, and so, Mr Stack, we exhort you to examine your conscience and make sure this is not the case . .
To sum up – Paul Lynch drives his novel forward to a conclusion that few readers will anticipate. I dare not say anything here that will give that conclusion away. It is cleverly obscured from view until almost the very end. When the revelation comes, it is sobering indeed. Its message warrants careful, nuanced thought and reflection.
Prophet Song is an exceptional piece of fiction that addresses issues of great contemporary importance, given the threats that democratic norms face in some Western countries today – democracies whose citizens may, at this very minute, be sleepwalking into a future that resembles the one conjured by Paul Lynch in his powerful novel. In that sense, the book sounds an alarm that it behoves us not to ignore.
Prophet Song is the novel for our times.
About our contributor
P.W. Bridgman writes poetry, fiction and literary criticism from Vancouver. His fifth book – a hybrid volume comprising new poetry and a novella in verse entitled The World You Now Own – was published by Ekstasis Editions in September 2024. You can see examples of his other writing for the Glasgow Review of Books by clicking here. And you can learn more about him by visiting his website and following him on Twitter.
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