Much-lauded Irish dystopian novel lands with a didactic thud
“Prophet Song” is a bleak novel that meditates on a family’s struggles during a dystopian imagining of Ireland as it descends into a totalitarian police state. Officials barricade streets and society falls apart one torn family at a time. War breaks out; disaster is all around. The novel focuses primarily on the interior of its main character, Eilish, who must protect her children after her husband is detained.
As the novel progresses, cataclysm abounds. Eilish, mother of four and respected scientist, is presented with impossible choices, one after another. However, in the end, I found myself unable to truly feel devastated along with its suffering characters, the reasons multiple.
Written in dry, gerund-heavy language with a tone of aimlessness, Paul Lynch has written what was, for me, a very frustrating novel. Billed as dystopian, the horrible world imagined here is rendered in a vague, distant way that never quite immerses the reader. Eilish is a dogged character, full of tenacity, but the didactic writing diminished what would otherwise have been emotionfilled scenes of a mother clinging to her children.
With few paragraph breaks and long chapters with winding, directionless sentences built into sheer blocks of unbroken, rarely punctuated text that fill up the entirety of the page, I found the prose nearly as impenetrable as the government Lynch imagined.
The imagining of a war-torn Ireland does have potential for an interesting novel premise, especially in a world with fascism ever on the rise. However, as it won the 2023 Booker Prize (awarded to the best work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland), I cannot help but find myself curious about the level of discernment that went into applauding this work at such a high literary level.
Let me explain.
Applying what may in many ways mirror the real-life modern-day experience of someone under an oppressive regime in, say, Syria or Afghanistan, to a white family in Ireland left me rather uneasy.
While the novel tried to veer its focus toward Eilish’s interiority of struggles with living under totalitarian rule, (unfortunately often flattening her character with poor decision making to favor plot), for a conscientious reader it is quite difficult to read this novel without, at minimum, a minor political bent.
At least on a surface level, the message of this novel can’t help but hint at saying something like: the Syrian refugee crisis could happen to a country like Ireland, too — does that make you care, Western world?
While the message may be a very important one, and is likely true, drafting the horrific experiences of disenfranchised humans for a work of fiction about a people group currently not having such an experience is a step in the wrong direction. To then laud such a novel as creative, original and arguably one of the best books published this year? That does not sit well with this reader.
Disclaimer: I cannot blame the author for experimenting with his craft. It is important to me that we not censor any author’s creativity or the story the artist is compelled to tell. Lynch even states in interviews he did not aim to write a political novel, but one that explored grief.
On the other hand, I do find the awarding of the Booker Prize to this novel in particular to be a peculiar, offkilter political statement and have difficulty seeing it otherwise. At the end of the day, when topicality wins out over ingenuity, I worry the literary world suffers.
John Caleb Grenn is a Med-Peds physician in Jackson. He is an avid reader of literary fiction and shares more reviews on Instagram at @jcgrenn_reads.