The Irish offspring of The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel is as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across: powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real. From its opening pages it exerts a grim kind of grip; even when approached cautiously and read in short bursts it somehow lingers, its world leaking out from its pages like black ink into clear water.
Lynch has form when it comes to dark subjects, having previously written about violence and revenge in fledgling America (Red Sky in Morning, his debut), a deadly blaze at a rural farm (The Black Snow), the Irish famine (Grace) and men adrift on the Pacific (Beyond the Sea). Even so, Prophet Song is likely to go down as his most frightening book.
We are in Dublin, a shadow version of the present day: an unspecified crisis has led to the government passing an act giving the Garda Síochána and judiciary emergency powers, and to the formation of an outfit called the Garda National Services Bureau – basically, the secret police. One evening, Eilish Stack, a microbiologist, opens the door to two GNSB men looking for her husband, Larry, a senior official in the Teachers’ Union of Ireland. Within days, he has vanished: swallowed whole, along with dozens and then hundreds of other ordinary, blameless civilians, into the implacable silence of the state.
As Eilish petitions for his release while trying to maintain some semblance of normality for their four children and to care for her elderly father, who is in the early stages of dementia, the safe, ordinary world – a world made possible and predictable by the rule of law – crumbles under her like sand. “What she sees before her is an idea of order coming undone, the world slewing into a dark and foreign sea,” Lynch writes. The question the book repeatedly poses is simple but unanswerable. “I wish you would listen to me,” Eilish’s sister Áine says on the phone from Canada. “History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”
Lynch is not the first male novelist to be influenced by Cormac McCarthy, and he won’t be the last; it’s a debt he acknowledges with one of the book’s three epigraphs, a quote from The Crossing. The influence manifests as heightened, sometimes biblical language, syntax and imagery, nouns and adjectives pressed into service as verbs (Eilish “coins free” a supermarket trolley; is “suddened into” a dark room), some extremely long sentences, and an aversion to semicolons. Now and again it is as though the world of Blood Meridian bleeds directly into this book, as when Eilish “hears behind her the blatter of hooves, turns to see three horses following the road at a canter, two dappled greys and a skewbald that pass by wild-eyed and berserk”.
Prophet Song also features no paragraph breaks, so that blocks of text sometimes run on for pages, uninterrupted visually, until a gap appears for a new section: not only does dialogue lack speech marks but speakers are not given a new line. Here is a fragment of dialogue between Eilish and Larry, part of a dense block of text that runs for three and a half pages:
“They know I’m a busy man, I am the deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, I do not hop, skip and jump to their every command. That is all well and good, Larry, but why did they call to the house at this hour and not to your office during the day, tell me that. Look, love, I’ll ring them tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, now, can we let this rest for the night? His body remains standing before her though his eyes have turned to the TV. It’s nine o’clock, he says … ”
As a device this takes some getting used to, though it makes more sense as the book goes on and the claustrophobia builds. To begin with it acts as a barrier, as though one must fight one’s way into a book that is resisting being read.
Lynch’s depiction of Eilish is nuanced and sympathetic, and in the fiercely embodied quality of her love for her children, entirely successful. It’s painful to see her lie to them over and over about what is happening in a way that risks breaking their trust, while knowing that we would probably do the same; hard, too, to see her vacillate about how best to keep them safe, while we, as readers, scream at her to run if she can. But if the vast energy she puts into holding on to the last tatters of their previous life is heartbreaking, as an act of denial it is also entirely human.
Amid the growing shadow of all-out war Lynch depicts the minutiae of domestic life in a house full of children: the sulks, the bickering, the unexpected moments of tenderness; the constant running out of milk and the defrosting of portions of bolognese. It is the stubborn continuation of these things that both fortifies and traps Eilish, and there are moments when the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic can be glimpsed behind the text in the bizarre spectacle of a world consumed by a terrifying crisis while still needing clean socks to be found.
The manner in which civil society breaks apart is lingeringly and brutally drawn: not only the obscenities enacted upon the citizens by the state – soon “the regime” – but those willingly enacted by one citizen against another. The picture of suburban Dublin lacking basic services, scarred by airstrikes and divided by makeshift roadblocks into rebel-held and regime-controlled areas, is both convincing and horrifying – yet no stage in the city’s awful descent is unlikely, exaggerated or difficult to believe. After all, we have seen it all unfold from the comfort of our sofas in former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Ukraine. Where Prophet Song leads us in its closing pages is shocking, yet grimly inevitable. We would do well not to look away.
• Prophet Song is published by Oneworld (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
