When I described the plot of this book to my hubby – about a country turned to anarchy, the tyranny of a government and brutality of the rebels –he said it could never happen in modern Ireland. This surprised me, as we were living in London during the troubles, had felt the bombings personally. It wasn’t so long ago. And Hitler’s rise to power less a century ago illustrates how a modern country can turn on itself in a heartbeat of time. Why assume sectarian violence has gone away? And yet Ireland, today, seems such a peaceful place. Paul Lynch’s book imagines how, still, it could turn. Horribly, given the increasingly polarised state of the world, I found his scenario felt entirely possible.
‘Stay or go’ becomes the haunting question. Eilish lives in Dublin with husband Larry and four children, aged from teens to a baby. Larry is a trade unionist, and one night he is called for questioning. Later, her son asks when he is coming home. ‘The long drop of her heart through her body is still falling.’ Her sister, in Canada, suggests they get out of the country, but Eilish waits for Larry to return, and also Dublin is home: the kids are settled at school, she’s a scientist and can’t leave her work. Her father lives independently but is beginning to struggle with self-care and with memory. Oldest son Mark wants to join the protests against the increasing government restrictions but he is called for service on the day he turns eighteen. Things heat up around the family. Lynch offers the big picture and the details, taking you into the hearts of these people.
Protesters have set up road blocks and are setting fires in the streets, effigies have been set alight in town squares, shop windows smashed and graffiti-sprayed with slogans. There are women in wedding dresses handing out pictures of husbands who have disappeared.
Stay or go? Every passing day the choice becomes more difficult. How long will it last, and how bad can it get? What psychological damage does such danger do to the children, and how safe are they? She can’t stay, she can’t go.
Lynch writes deep in the character of Eilish, who is a representative of every oppressed person in any conflict. She hugs and shouts at her children, judges people, misjudges situations, hopes for a miracle, waits. She looks back on the past and recognises the loss of everyday family life, Larry checking the kids’ schoolbags, Molly refusing to wear a coat, Mark with his lost shoe. ‘She sees how happiness hides in the humdrum, how it abides in the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should not be seen, as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past.’
Prophet Song was the Booker Prize winner in 2023, so I nearly didn’t read it (as I’ve said before, the runners up are nearly always better). There is the expected experimental writing, in this case – no paragraphs in the book, no speech marks. I got over that by page two. In 2018 another Irish troubles book, The Milkman won the Booker (those Irish!) with similarly dense text, but that was pretty impregnable. Prophet Song, on the other hand, not only draws you in but pulls you under.
Prophet Song was recommended to me by the wonderful Phil, at Wardini Books, who is a treasure trove of great reads. I asked her, as an Irish woman, if she thought the book held any truths. “It could happen,” she said. “Sure.”
Cristina Sanders' blog 