If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. The Limerick-born author’s fifth novel imagines the Republic of Ireland slipping into totalitarianism after the rise of the rightwing National Alliance party which seizes total control in response to trade unionists lobbying for increased teachers’ wages. Civil liberties erode and civil war breaks out. Like a lobster in a boiling pot, people don’t realise their freedoms have been obliterated until it’s too late: “All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.”
Lynch’s critically acclaimed third novel, Grace, was likened to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and this could also be said of the Man Booker-longlisted Prophet Song, a dystopian nightmare in which the Stack family endure the horrors of the “great waking”.
The book is also reminiscent of Anna Burns’s Milkman in that it’s an important story aching to be told, heavy with the reality it bears. While Burns wrote of sexual harassment, Lynch’s dystopian Ireland reflects the reality of war-torn countries, where refugees take to the sea to escape persecution on land. Prophet Song echoes the violence in Palestine, Ukraine and Syria, and the experience of all those who flee from war-torn countries. This is a story of bloodshed and heartache that strikes at the core of the inhumanity of western politicians’ responses to the refugee crisis.
Told without paragraph breaks, the book has a breathless, claustrophobic atmosphere. Free will and the meaning of liberty are pushed beyond their limits, eroding both to a state of near non-existence. It begins in Dublin as Larry, a senior trade unionist, is disappeared at a rally, leaving his wife, Eilish, to raise their four children. She must make impossible decisions to protect her family. In one heart-wrenching scene, she has to run across no man’s land to see her injured son at a hospital, risking execution by snipers shooting at civilians.
Leaving home for an unknown existence beyond Ireland’s borders is a choice made all the graver for Eilish as her father, Simon, who has early stage dementia, is insistent on remaining in the house he shared with his wife. Shouting at a trafficker sent to rescue her and her family, Eilish says: “What my father needs is … to be surrounded by his memories, to have the past within reach.”
Eilish’s conversations with her father are fraught with memory slippage as she grapples to make him understand the severity of their situation. But his mind wanders between the past and present, conjuring false memories of his long dead wife. He is sometimes aware of the realities of the conflict, and when he is, he is razor-sharp: “you [Eilish] believe in rights that don’t exist, the rights you speak of cannot be verified they are a fiction decreed by the state”. He tells her to leave him behind and go to Canada – anywhere but here.
Lynch’s message is crystal clear: lives the world over are experiencing upheaval, violence, persecution. Prophet Song is a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere.
• Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is published by Oneworld (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
