On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.
A chilling and terrifying imagined account of a country’s slip from a familiar tension between government and dissenting voices, which slips with inevitable horror into oppression, terror, civil war and horror, witnessed through a domestic lens.
What I Liked
- The focus on the family and the domestic world, the impact of politics and conflict on the most tender of relationships;
- The surreal horrors of the final sections, and the spiral into chaos
- The language – Lynch liked to play with his words, using nouns as verbs which was sometimes beautiful and lyrical
What Could Have Been Different
- The dialogue in the opening sections felt a little forced and artificial.
Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel is a chilling read from the opening pages: a pair of GSNB secret police officers knock on the door of her home – invade her home – seeking her husband who is a trade unionist for a teaching union. This opening scene is heavy with tension and half-expressed threat, and the setting is emblematic of the whole novel – the conflict between the state and the individual, the family.
Lynch uses the first part of the novel to introduce his Ireland that has already slipped into a police state – and at times the conversations between the characters are a little laboured here but it serves its purpose. There are emergency powers granted to the government, powers being used to oppress dissent… and as Larry Stack, Eilish’s husband, sets off to join a peaceful protest, it feels terribly inevitable that he becomes a victim of that regime, taken, disappeared by the authorities.
Eilish’s attempts to hold her family together – teenage sons, a daughter, a teething baby, an increasingly vulnerable father suffering from Alzheimers – in this disintegrating community is a series of terrible choices. How much truth can the family manage? How much damage would a lie cause? How far can her neighbours and friends be trusted?
There are some truly shocking moments in the novel and it is at many points an exceptionally difficult and bleak read. There are very hard descriptions of police brutality, of terror and of violence and death – or at least the aftermath of it – and one particular scene as Eilish is looking through the corpses in the morgue, hoping not to find her thirteen-year-old son there was particularly gruelling. There was a real dearth of good characters outside the Stack family: friends and neighbours either had their own agendas or were too cowed by the events transpiring around them to support each other. As a revolutionary militia rises up, their agenda is just as inimical to human dignity as the Government was. Even those who offered to help Eilish and her family flee were corrupt and money-grabbing and untrustworthy.
Do I think the novel should have won the Booker in 2023? For me, whilst it is an important novel, I think that Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting was a worthier winner. It was a more storied novel in many ways and explored strikingly similar ground – the collapse of a family in Ireland under the pressures of the society around them – but the characterisation I found more convincing and the language more authentic.
