From Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, to the global success of the Hunger Games film franchise, the early 21st century has been a golden – or should that be dark – age for dystopian visions of human destiny. Further confirmation that these days the future tends to loom rather than beckon came this week, when the latest Booker prize went to Paul Lynch’s bleakly urgent Prophet Song.
Lynch’s rendering of an imagined totalitarian Ireland taps into fears that a resurgent far right could threaten freedoms formerly taken for granted in the postwar west. As it follows the desperate journey of a family attempting to flee the new order, it also obliges readers to empathise with another developing crisis of our times: the terrible exposure to violence and abuse suffered by refugees on the move.
