Prophet song (man booker prize 2023) Paperback – August 22, 2023

A phenomenal novel, notable both for its writing and timely message: fascism is a real and dangerous threat to modern democracies. In addition, the author Paul Lynch, whom this reader met at a book-signing, is warm and approachable—not at all arrogant at having won the Booker Prize—one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world.The book-signing I attended was preceded by an hour-long interview with Lynch, who in the process gave a kind of master class in writing fiction, while also unobtrusively showing off his wide reading in fiction, past and present.The interviewer began by asking Lynch how it was that he, Lynch, wrote a novel about America. The question drew a laugh from the audience, but Lynch responded that he had been promoting the book in India just the previous week, and a woman there had said to him, “You’ve told our story.”At this point, Lynch reflected briefly on how hectic his life had been since winning the Booker Prize—80 interviews. He admitted that all of his recent travels had exhausted him, saying that “my internal clock is like a Dali timepiece.”When asked whether Prophet Song was a dystopian novel, Lynch demurred. Lynch felt that dystopian novels basically deliver a message of grievance, while “fiction is about grief, not grievance.” He continued that “dystopian fiction seems a bit paper-maché,” and in general he is skeptical of political novels. He said that fiction needs rather to show complexity, and to view things, not through one lens, but rather through multiple lenses.Lynch admitted that one can interpret Prophet Song from a political perspective, but then “a good book allows for multiple interpretations.” He said that “you are conditioned by democracy to assume that nothing will change,” but his story examines the lives of people upended by a fascist takeover. About his main character, Eilish (“aye-lish”) Stark, he said: “she has been lifted off her feet by a riptide.”In this spirit, Lynch sees himself following in the footsteps of the great writers of the past, insofar as his task is to “see what the human condition is while telling stories about human beings.” Furthermore, he thinks that the “human condition needs to be interpreted anew by each generation.”As for the totalitarian regime portrayed in Prophet Song and the multiple human tragedies that it causes, Lynch said that “the end of the world is always happening somewhere.” He referenced Gaza and the Ukraine. Lynch’s own story is intended to “map the effects of circumstances on the individual characters,” and “tyranny is transmitted into the psychology of the characters.” He advocates realism as “important to root the reader in the present moment,” and “to reach up and get hold of reality, and then to put it on the page.”Lynch realizes that Prophet Song asks a lot of the reader in following the un-raveling of a family, as well as the un-raveling of a state, because “the book hurts you.” By the same token, however, Lynch described the act of writing this story as descending into the 8th or 9th level of Dante’s Inferno. Still, he hoped that the ending created empathy in the readers.There were questions about Lynch’s dense prose style, in which long, long sentences contain description and dialogue with little of the punctuation with which these items are customarily treated. There are also no paragraphs, only sections of a few pages each. Lynch stated that he did not begin with any certain style in mind with which he would write the novel, but rather the style flowed organically from the story he was trying to tell.Lynch described his point-of-view in the novel as 3rd-person, limited omniscient narrator, meaning that the narrator knows only as much as the character. He described his approach to fiction as trying to find an alignment between his interests or obsessions and the story he wants to tell. He said also: “I’m not a mainstream writer. I’ve always played at the edge of the court.”Lynch’s hour-long talk was a triumph of hard-won wisdom and erudition, and at its conclusion, the audience rewarded him with enthusiastic and sustained applause.After the interview, Lynch faced a line of autograph-seekers stretching to the back of the room. When it was my turn, he met me with friendly eye contact and personalized his inscription as I requested. Despite being among the very select few writers who ever win a Booker Prize, Paul Lynch was approachable and kind, when one might have expected the exact opposite from a world-class writer.

Please don’t read this if you are afraid of spoilers.I generally trust the Booker Prize to lead me to books that are worth reading. This shortlisted novel, though not a top-tier one in my estimation, was certainly worth reading, with some memorable characters and harrowing passages. It tells the story of a civil war unfolding in modern-day Ireland with scenes of horror reminiscent of, say, the Balkans in the ‘90’s or the Middle East.In the first part of the story, the breakdown of society is just beginning. The current government is staring to turn into a fascist state that brings to mind the warnings of Orwell in 1984. Eilish Stack is a wife and mother to four children. In the early days, her husband is disappeared by the secret police as a union agitator. Gradually, war breaks out and Eilish’s neighborhood becomes a war zone between the resistance and the government.In this book, there are striking moments both large and small. You feel for Eilish as she gets pressured out of her job and struggles to put food on the table. You see her work her way through checkpoints in an effort to get necessities and check on her father, suffering from dementia, who lives on the other side. You see her struggle with the decision to escape to Canada and safety with her sister.Worse, however, is the unknown fate of her oldest son, who disappears to fight with the resistance when he is called up for government service. And, worst of all, and a scene I’ll never forget, is Eilish finding the body of her younger son in a body bag in a morgue. He goes into the hospital for treatment and is taken by the secret police and tortured to death. Her searching through the crowd of body bags to find her boy and they seeing the damage done to his body is heart-wrenching.As I read this, however, I struggled with one major thing that distracted me from getting the most out of this: I couldn’t quite believe that this could really happen. There was no good explanation for why this happened in a country like Ireland. There was no history for it, like, say, the Troubles, and I couldn’t understand why society broke down at this point in time. So, this book became for me a sequence of powerful scenes with no foundation—worth reading but not the best of novels.

Amazing writing! Reminds me of Falkner. Thinking about what today's polarization and authoritarian tendencies could lead to if we are unable to stop it soon.

My book club loved it as it was so relevant and engaging. It's heavy and sometimes strikes too close to home but worth the journey. It's one of those stories that stays with you long after you finish the book.