Yet Prophet Song is also a warm, intimate story about a woman's love for her family and her desperate attempts to hold the world together in the face of growing chaos.
Author Paul Lynch at the awards night
In Prophet Song , Lynch creates a completely fictional Ireland under the control of fascism and totalitarianism. The protagonist Eilish Stack - a scientist living in Dublin and mother of four, busy with work, family and an aging father. Then one day , harsh reality knocks on her door: the newly formed secret police arrive to question her husband Larry because he is a union member.
Along with many others, Larry suddenly disappeared. The couple’s teenage children wanted to march, protest, and fight back, but all Eilish wanted was to keep them hidden and safe. As civil war broke out, the streets of Dublin filled with barricades and snipers, she remained frozen in confusion. Her sister in Canada begged her over the phone to try to escape.
Prophet Song is a work of fiction, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale , inspired by events happening around the world. Families like Eilish’s suffering in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine and elsewhere, refugees fleeing political violence, women’s rights being violated globally and the rise of the far right in Europe…
Lynch has described his book as “an attempt at radical empathy,” using fiction to overcome the complacency that has become normalized and prevalent in Western societies saturated with global news. It is written in the present tense, in claustrophobic “slabs” of prose, with long sentences that add to the sense of oppression. There are also no quotation marks or paragraph breaks, as if there is no pause or respite in the aforementioned dark nightmare.
Prophet Song wins 2023 Booker Prize
Critics have also noted the influence of the late Cormac McCarthy. This is a novel written to awaken readers to truths that we are almost unwilling to acknowledge. We have been asleep all our lives, we have all been deceived, and now the great awakening begins.
The Triumph of Emotional, Courageous Storytelling
This year’s jury president, novelist Esi Edugyan, commented: “From the very first page, Prophet Song jolts us out of complacency as we follow the terrifying story of a woman trying to protect her family in a fictional Ireland descending into totalitarianism. We are unsettled, immersed and haunted by a persistent, claustrophobic fear. The author is unflinching, depicting the reality of violence without offering comforting words.”
On the writing, he said: “Sentences are stretched to the limit, and Lynch creates linguistic feats that are astonishing. He has the heart of a poet, using recurring motifs to create a powerful reading experience. It is a triumph of emotional, courageous, and uncompromising storytelling, through which the book captures the social and political anxieties of our time.”
Before the news of the win was announced, Prophet Song was the odds-on favorite. “A decade ago, this book might have seemed like a far-fetched dystopian scenario, but with recent global conflicts, such stories have become all too familiar in the news landscape. So Lynch’s Prophet Song is remarkably timely and a worthy winner,” said critics.
Speaking about the book, Lynch said: “I was trying to look at the current chaos. The unrest in Western democracies, the problem of Syria – the collapse of a state, the scale of the refugee crisis and the indifference of the West… Prophet Song is partly an attempt to achieve radical empathy. To understand better, we must first experience the problem ourselves. So I tried to dig into the dystopia by bringing it to a high level of realism.”
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