The world does not end in Paul Lynch’s most recent novel "Prophet Song," but rather it is falling apart only in Dublin while prophets sing the same song across time and the cycle of history repeats itself over and over again. To avoid any misunderstanding, this is not a post-apocalyptic fiction with some supernatural signs of doom. Nevertheless, it would be underwhelming to oversimplify the main theme as just a political disturbance in social order.
Lynch brings the bane of distant lands to Ireland, his home country, and leads his characters toward bearing loss and grasping in the dark.
The internal tension begins to rise for Eilish Stack, the protagonist of the novel when two plainclothesmen from a new secret police force knock on her door. She goes through an interrogation about her husband Larry who is the leader of the teachers’ union. Although the officers depart from her house shortly afterward, that heavy atmosphere invades the space and preys upon her family.
Yet still, Eilish’s daily life moves on with her work routine as a senior manager in a biotech company. In the meantime, she takes care of her four children and her father who has early-stage dementia. Eilish begins to worry about the safety of her husband while he is getting prepared for his protest march with other trade unionists. According to Larry Stack, she just meets trouble halfway and there would be no problem at all. It is his constitutional right to have a peaceful union march after all.
However, the oppressive regime of the new government takes effect on the teachers’ strike, and Larry is arrested with other marchers for no reason. This incident becomes one of the triggers to spark a civil war between rebellions and the state, while the Stack family descends into desperation with the rest of the Irısh citizens in the face of political upheaval.
Since there is no sight or sound of her husband, Eilish Stack must assume authoritative parenting in the house. She struggles to maintain the security of the children as her eldest son, Mark, intends to join the resistance, her daughter Molly sinks into depression, and her younger son Bailey storms at her constantly. Moreover, looking after her infant son Ben and geriatric father Simon adds to her weighty responsibilities. When push comes to shove, Eilish finds herself in a dilemma to flee abroad or stay home.
It might seem as though running away is the sole remedy to ride out the storm, but is it worth leaving everything behind? As the struggle against fascism becomes more of an armed combat, Eilish realizes that she has to take prompt action to provide a safer future for her children. On the other hand, she is disinclined to abandon her lost husband and elderly father who needs to be surrounded by his memories. Although Simon is aware of his inability to flee from the country due to his dementia, he insists on his daughter going anywhere but here, without him.
Paul Lynch emphasizes this predicament with well-written phrases like, “History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice.’’ It is just one of the moments that reflects psychological influences and develops empathy toward characters.
Speaking of empathy, Lynch’s writing style plays an essential role in this respect. He chose to write every dialogue without paragraph breaks and quotation marks, which makes it harder to distinguish thoughts and speeches while reading. Although the lack of paragraph breaks confuses readers at intervals, it also gives claustrophobic vibes and increases paranoia throughout the novel. That might be considered a controversial decision, but it provides a solid ground for the dystopian atmosphere.
There is a long waiting period for Eilish and her family to reserve judgment about their next move. This process is expounded strikingly by Carole, a distressed housewife whose husband is taken captive for the same reasons.
“I don’t sleep much at all, she says, I dream each night of a soundless sleep but that is impossible now, it took me some time before I understood that I was already asleep in a manner, you know, that I was sleeping all the time I thought I was awake, trying to see into the problem that stood before me like a great darkness, this silence consuming every moment of my life, I thought I’d go mad looking into it but then I awoke and began to see what they were doing to us, the brilliance of the act, they take something from you and replace it with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment, and cannot live, you cease to be yourself and become a thing before this silence, a thing waiting for the silence to end, a thing on your knees begging and whispering to it all night and day, a thing waiting for what was taken to be returned and only then can you resume your life, but the silence doesn’t end,” Carole says.
During this catastrophic chain of events, the Stacks strain to keep hope alive despite their neighborhood being terrorized by airstrikes and heavy bombardment. Eilish constantly reassures her kids that everything is going to be all right as the level of anxiety gets higher, even though she feels like telling the same lies over and over again. Thus, her burden turns into a heavy cross to bear since motherhood becomes just as challenging as survival itself while the governance is getting corrupted and the civilians of Dublin are engulfed in chaos.
From the beginning, the totalitarian regime seizes unlimited authority through the Emergency Powers Act. However, this emergent thread against the state remains unknown all along.
Paul Lynch states that he is mainly inspired by the Syrian civil war and the indifference of Western policies toward the refugee crisis, as is seen through the plot. Furthermore, his novel contains the overtones of recently war-torn countries such as Ukraine and Palestine although he started to write it before that period.
While the whole world was taken aback by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the clashing environment in the Middle East has been normalized for ages, as if war becomes a tragedy in only significant regions, and it counts for nothing in the other corner of the world. Even today the Palestinian genocide is unregarded or considered as Israel’s deserving cause in some perspectives. This case of wilful neglect sets up a good example for Lynch’s criticism of moral hypocrisy and political ignorance: “How many people across how many lifetimes have watched upon war bearing down on their home, watching and waiting for fate to come, entering into silent negotiation, whispering and then pleading, the mind anticipating all outcomes but for the specter that cannot be directly looked at.”
Besides this quotation, there is one more passage in the last pages that manifests the essence of those longstanding plights and proves why "Prophet Song" is deemed worthy of England’s National Booker Prize:
“She can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”
"Prophet Song" is a literary requiem for civil freedom in a possible disaster scenario that drags the whole society into a deadlock. On the flip side, it serves as a global call for a rude awakening that the end of the world might happen anywhere.
