Ireland’s sixth author to claim Booker Prize

Seán Beattie recalls Paul Lynch, a former student in the school where Seán was Head of the English Department, winning the Booker Prize 2023 with his novel Prophet Song

PROPHET SONG is the fifth novel of the Dublin-based prizewinning author, Paul Lynch. A Limerick native, he grew up in Donegal and completed his Leaving Certificate in Carndonagh Community School in 1995.

Being included in a short list of six international writers vying for the Booker Prize, his name has featured prominently in the best-seller lists.

Finally, at a reception in London last November, and after many international book-signings, he proudly claimed the Booker Prize for Ireland.

He is the sixth Irish writer to receive the prestigious award, which saw his name topping the best-selling lists across the globe.

Now in his mid-forties, he signs on as a member of an elite club which includes literary heavyweights such as Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Roddy Doyle, John Banville and Iris Murdoch.

Prior to the award ceremony, the Booker judges described the book as “harrowing and dystopian”. The leading critics of the main English newspapers referred to the novel as “haunting”, “nightmarish”, “bristling with tension”, “chilling” and “devastating”.

It sounds like a horror story and it has all the ingredients of the genre.

When asked at the presentation in London which authors had influenced him, he replied that when he read the Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy as a teenager, he wept. This novel was on the Leaving Certificate Honours course in English when Lynch studied for the exam.

AT THE heart of Prophet Song, there is the family of Larry and Eilish Stack, the former being deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland and the latter a microbiologist. A critical incident in their lives dominates the theme of the book.

Larry is arrested by the Garda National Services Bureau (GNSB) for what amounts to a vague and unsubstantiated accusation, that his conduct appears to be that of a person who is “inciting hatred against the state”. As the story unfolds, Ireland slowly plunges into a state of anarchy.

His wife, Eilish, finds herself at the centre of a dystopian world as she attempts to cope with her husband’s disappearance and also raise her four children. Unable to trace his whereabouts and fearful for her own life, the novel takes an unexpected turn as Eilish make a fateful decision towards the end.

The book has echoes for realities past and present. Growing up in Carndonagh, a short distance from the Border, which his family crossed regularly on shopping trips to Derry, Lynch may be drawing on some of his own observations during the Troubles.

As a sensitive teenager, he was aware of checkpoints, sandbags, cordons, roadblocks, sharp-shooters and watchtowers appearing at regular intervals. There are reminders, too, of events recalled during our Decade of Centenaries: street fighting, civil war, imprisonment and torture.

The current state of unrest elsewhere in the world – Israel, Armenia, Palestine, Ukraine and Iraq – is replicated in many chapters of the novel as refugees flee tyranny. Eilish is faced with the inevitable reminder that “history is a silent record of people who could not leave”, but eventually makes a fateful decision.

THE RIOTS in Dublin City took place a few days before he was awarded the Booker Prize. Having spent four years writing the novel, he can rightly claim that there is no direct link between the present unrest and the story of the novel itself. But for a short period in Dublin on one November night, by sheer coincidence, there seemed to be a close association between events in the capital and the novel.

Dublin presented a glimpse into what such a dystopian world could look like.

This is his fifth book but Lynch has honed a unique style in this publication. It is perhaps the easiest to read. Sentences crash into each other, paragraphs cascade from page to page and neologisms constantly startle the reader to reflect on the horrors of living in a dysfunctional state. Thus, style and content interact to add a raw vibrancy to unfolding events. His language slowly evokes states of terror from the opening lines: “she has not heard the knocking”; the secret police are at her doorstep. His images are subtle and cryptic at times: “the sea is life”, as Eilish faces the unknown, as the novel ends.

WHAT MESSAGE is Lynch trying to get across? We are living in a world facing increased political instability. Democracies are under threat. Minorities are subject to persecution, and daily life is subject to catastrophic upheaval. This is a post-Orwellian future, where the rights of citizens are crushed ignominiously and law-abiding citizens are treated as criminals as they go about their daily business.

The most chilling aspect of the novel is that it is not set in some remote puppet republic but in Lynch’s home country, Ireland. In some respects, Lynch’s novel can be compared to George Orwell’s 1984, but it is more brutal. It is too early to predict where Lynch’s talents could take him, but the Nobel Prize could be a possibility in the future. A signed copy of the first edition of Prophet Song is a treasure. ■