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”.
