The chaos, clarity behind ‘Prophet Song’
Paul Lynch feared novel would end career, but it won the Booker Prize
When Paul Lynch started writing his novel “Prophet Song,” he worried it might destroy his career.
The story — an unsettling dystopian parable — was stylistically daring, relentlessly dark and more emotionally taxing than anything he had attempted before. He thought it would never get published. But when he sat down in his Dublin home and typed out the novel’s opening passages, he couldn’t stop.
“The damn thing had its own momentum,” Lynch said. “It just sucked me in.”
Four years later, “Prophet Song” won the Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, putting to rest any lingering selfdoubt Lynch may have had about his future as a writer.
The novel, which Atlantic Monthly Press will release in the United States on Tuesday, follows Eilish, a biologist and mother of four whose busy domestic life in suburban Dublin is shattered when the secret police show up at her home looking for her husband, a senior leader of a teachers union. He disappears and never returns. As the country slides into totalitarianism and civil war, Eilish struggles to keep her traumatized family intact, burying herself in mundane household tasks as the world around them crumbles into chaos.
The narrative — written in breathless prose, without quotation marks or paragraph breaks — feels almost claustrophobic, closely tracking Eilish’s oscillation between panic, denial and grief rather than exploring the larger political forces driving the plot.
Literary critics have lauded “Prophet Song” as a frighteningly plausible parable that probes some of the most pressing social questions of our era. Some see the novel as an urgent message about complacency in the face of rising authoritarianism, as a wake-up call for Western citizens who have grown indifferent to the plight of refugees, or as a cautionary tale about extremism and how quickly societies can fracture when political violence is normalized.
Lynch can see why readers draw those parallels. After winning the Booker, he has been asked for his views on far-right movements in Western Europe and about the recent riots in Dublin that were sparked by rightwing agitators — an event that he found both shocking and depressingly predictable, as extremist ideology continues to spread.
But Lynch says he never set out to write a political novel.
Although he’s flattered by comparisons to classics such as “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” he feels they are distant relatives. He deliberately left the political ideology in his novel vague, and never specified whether the catastrophe is unfolding in the future or in a counterfactual present, he said.
“My themes tend to be more metaphysical than political,” he said during an interview — his 37th in three days — over Zoom. “A lot of political fiction begins with its own answer — it knows the problem and it knows the solution — and so therefore, it’s about grievance. And I think the work of serious fiction must instead be grief: grief for the things we cannot control, grief for what cannot be understood, grief for what lies beyond us.”
Novelist Colum McCann, who compared Lynch to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, said the musicality of the prose in “Prophet Song” allowed Lynch to invoke weighty political themes without being too heavy handed.
“He’s not being didactic, but he’s getting a very serious message across, and I thought there was a real bravery with this particular book, taking on such a big subject at a time when the world is in pieces,” he said. “I haven’t been as knocked off balance by a book in quite a while.”
Lynch was born in Limerick in 1977, and grew up in County Donegal, where his family lived for a while in Malin Head, a rugged, desolate village on the coast. He was such an insatiable reader that when he was 11, his parents got him a job at a used bookstore. He studied philosophy and English at University College Dublin, but dropped out to pursue a career in journalism at The Irish Sunday Tribune, where he worked as an editor and a film critic.
He was 30 when he decided to leave journalism and pursue fiction. His first novel, “Red Sky in Morning,” opens in Donegal in 1832, and follows a man who’s committed murder and flees to the United States, landing among the Irish laborers working on the Pennsylvania Railroad. The novel sparked a bidding war in Britain, and sold for six figures in a two-book deal. It seemed like an auspicious start. But when it came out in 2013, the reception was muted, Lynch said.
“Back home in Ireland, there seemed to be confusion about what I was doing,” he said. “I felt very misunderstood.”
His second book, “The Black Snow,” about a catastrophic fire on a farm in Donegal in 1945, was a sensation in France and was embraced by critics in the United States, drawing comparisons to Seamus Heaney and McCarthy. But in Ireland, it “sold next to nothing,” Lynch said.
“At that point, I knew I was in serious trouble,” he said. “I knew that my next book had to be an all-ornothing novel.”
That impulse led to “Grace,” a novel that excavated one of the most painful chapters of Irish history, the 19th century famine. After the anemic sales of his previous books, publishers were skeptical. It took Lynch’s agent more than a year and more than a dozen rejections before he finally sold it to Oneworld, a British publisher. When it came out in 2017, the book vaulted Lynch to further international acclaim and won accolades at home, receiving the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award. For Lynch, the reception among Irish readers and critics was especially gratifying.
“That book symbolically became a way of finding a new way of telling the mythology of Ireland, stripping away all the romanticism and self pity, the sense of victimhood, stripping it down to something deeply elemental,” he said.
In the time that it took his agent to find a publisher for “Grace,” Lynch finished his fourth novel, “Beyond the Sea,” about two South American fisherman who are stranded in the Pacific. Bleak and haunting, it was his effort to reinvent what he felt was a lost strain of existentialist fiction, in the mold of writers such as Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Joseph Conrad.
If there’s a unifying thread in his work, it’s Lynch’s “tragic worldview,” he said. “That is a core tenet of my fiction, and I find myself coming back to it again and again, with characters who are trying to arrive at a sense of dignity, of who they are, while encountering an inalienable world that does not care for them.”
Although all of Lynch’s books feature characters who confront unbearable hardship and tragedy, “Prophet Song” is perhaps his most unrelentingly bleak. It’s also his most deeply personal book, Lynch said. The detailed descriptions of the minutiae of daily life, as Eilish shops for milk and hurries her children off to school, were drawn directly from Lynch’s experience as a father, juggling his writing while caring for his two children. Lifting details from his own life was a way to ground what could have become an abstract and distant dystopian tale firmly in the present, he said.
“As I was writing it, I thought, this might be understood to be a dystopian novel, and so I’m going to explode the form, by injecting as much reality into the story as possible,” he said.
When it came time to write the novel’s brutal conclusion, he felt paralyzed and couldn’t write for nearly three months. A dream unlocked the ending for him.
After he wrote the story’s harrowing final scenes, his sense of relief was punctured by a real-life nightmare. In the summer of 2022, Lynch went to see the doctor for a chest infection, and during a chest scan, a radiologist discovered a tumor on his kidney. A difficult course of treatment followed, with a successful surgery to have the kidney removed. Soon after the surgery, his marriage ended.
A year later, “Prophet Song” was up for the Booker.
At the ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, he felt shaken and overwhelmed, he said; the difficulties he had endured over the past year weighed on him.
Twenty minutes before the winner was announced, he left the room in a panic. Novelist Ben Okri followed him into the hallway and reassured him. Lynch returned to the hall, and his name was called.
“People who know me and know what my year has been like tell me this is a fairy tale, and there are moments when I allow myself to think maybe that’s true,” he said, a smile breaking over his face. “The universal trickster has been having some fun at my expense.”