PattyMacDotComma's Reviews > Prophet Song

2023 winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction
4★
“Let me understand you correctly, he says, you’re asking me to prove that my behaviour is not seditious? Yes, that is correct, Mr Stack. But how can I prove what I am doing is not seditious when I’m merely just doing my job as a trade unionist, exercising my right under the constitution? That is up to you, Mr Stack, unless we decide this warrants further investigation, in which case it will no longer be up to you and we will decide.”

Dystopian Dublin, which is not Belfast and The Troubles, this is worse, it’s insidious, it’s relentless, it’s all too believable, and Lynch just keeps pouring out event after event, thought after thought, sometimes in beautiful, inspired language that I didn’t want to interrupt, but sometimes with far-too-clever phrases that I thought perhaps he had collected and saved for use in a novel.

“She drives to the supermarket and coins free a trolley
. . .
a boy standing in the driveway of a house across the street watches the evacuation while rounding an orange in his hand.”

The long convoluted sentences, some pages long with no quotation marks or paragraph breaks demand constant, close attention. Turning other parts of speech into verbs, while descriptive, tends to interrupt the flow and pace of what is an intense, exhausting story.

The nature of his writing leaves the reader gasping for breath. The section I quoted is a small part of the scene where Larry Stack, the father of the family and a supporter of those protesting against the government, is answering to two visiting Garda, from the Garda National Services Bureau. He’s being told, basically, that he can’t win, and it’s not long before he is arrested.

"How quickly posters have appeared on the advertising boards along the bus routes, pages handwritten or typed up on a computer with the photos of men and women who have disappeared, the people arrested, detained by the regime, one moment you are asleep in your bed and wake to see the GNSB standing in your room, they ask you to put on some clothes, help you find your shoes."

After Larry is picked up, Eilish is left with four children. Their eldest is Mark, who is only a couple of weeks shy of his seventeenth birthday and has already been notified that he must register, but he is determined to leave home and join the rebels.

Fifteen-year-old Molly hangs a white ribbon from the tree in their yard every week that her father is gone. Twelve-year-old Bailey is a lively boy, who begins acting up as Eilish is becoming more stressed and highly strung and protective. Bossy, pushy, becoming frantic.

On top of that, baby Ben is teething. One day, Molly announces:

“I’m going out, she says. Out where? I’m going into town. Eilish regards her for a moment, the white denim jacket, the white scarf coiled around her neck. If you’re going into town, she says, you can take them off right now. Molly looks down at her body with mock surprise. Take what off right now? You know what I’m talking about. How do I know what you’re talking about, how do I know what anybody is talking about or even thinking of for that matter if nobody says anything, if nothing is ever said in this house?”

Eilish’s sister and family live safely in Canada, while her father lives in another part of the city alone with his dog and his increasingly failing memory. Checkpoints sprout on street corners, men with firearms patrol, curfews are put in place, shortages make shopping difficult, and Eilish’s sister keeps pressuring her to leave. But the government won’t issue baby Ben a passport.

As I was reading this in December 2023, the news has been filled with the obliteration of Gaza, which made the strikes and attacks in this even more frightening. But it isn’t about me or how I felt.

“… it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time,…
. . .
and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, 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. . . ”

Lynch began writing this four years ago, and he thought it might end his career. I can see why he feared that and also why it didn’t, and I can also see why the Booker committee selected it. On the other hand, I can also understand why many readers have left it unfinished or given it a very low rating. To say it's divisive is an understatement.

None of the characters got under my skin or stirred me, but the way they represent everything that is so outrageously wrong with justice in the world today, certainly affected me - the fracturing of the family unit, the division between friends.

This may be dystopian fiction about Dublin, but it’s just the way the world has been working for a long time for so many people in African and South American countries, Eastern Europe, and throughout Asia.

As Lynch says, their news “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...” Don't ignore the news.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for a copy of #ProphetSong for review.