The philosopher Hannah Arendt’s much-quoted description of the “banality of evil” could be applied to the disquieting story told in Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. The Booker prize-winning novel is a perfect study of the banality of totalitarianism.
It’s a rigorous imagining of how a society can be gripped by the slow-building mechanisms of an authoritarian regime – the arrests, conspiracies and disappearances – yet continue its mundane daily rituals of creche drop offs and bin collections.
In this fable of a Dublin family whose life is ruptured by the imposition of a vicious new state order and its brutal secret police, the slide from ordinary to extraordinary is captured in the smallest domestic details. A child wetting its bed in a bad dream becomes a portent of disorder, of “the world slewing into a dark and foreign sea”.
