'The Slide to Illiberalism Represents a Dialling Down of Compassion': Paul Lynch

Kozhikode: “The story is over as soon as the book begins,” Irish author Paul Lynch said about Booker Prize-winning novel Prophet Song at the Kerala Literature Festival 2025. The rest of the book, he went on, is about dealing with the protagonist’s – and maybe the reader’s – denial about just how bad things are, about the fact that it is really over.

Prophet Song is set in Ireland during an imagined authoritarian crisis, following one family’s unravelling after a knock on the door from the secret police leads to the protagonist’s husband’s arrest. It won Lynch the Booker Prize in 2023, with the jury calling the book “a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave”.

This is Lynch’s fifth novel, after Red Sky in Morning, The Black Snow, Grace and Beyond the Sea. He believes his books “aren’t easy”, that they challenge the reader in ways that literature should.

In conversation with The Wire in Kozhikode, Lynch talked about what he sets out to do when he writes, how literature can build empathy, how technology has changed us, and more.

Edited excerpts from the interview follow.

Some have called Prophet Song a dystopian novel, but it seems to be a reflection of realities we’ve seen historically and continue to see in different parts of the world. When you set out to write it, were you imagining it as a dystopian extreme? Or thinking of certain realities?

I think the idea I had at the time was to evoke a sense of the dystopian, and then to explode the form – to add to it a profound sense of the real, the hyperreal, and then to actually alter the reader’s experience so that as they progress through the novel, they come to realise that the world they’re in isn’t a dystopian world, it’s actually the now. It’s the present moment for millions of people around the world.

And also very strangely, in Europe a lot of people do read the book as a cautionary tale. But it seems that the projected reality of the book is starting to become our reality much more quickly than maybe I had anticipated. I don’t know what to say about that.

Reading Prophet Song feels a little bit like you’re holding your breath, like you’re caught in the panic and the chaos of the characters’ lives. Was that the feeling you were trying to invoke when you didn’t include paragraph breaks?

Yes, I wanted to give the reader a panic attack. When you chase after that, when you deepen the real, when you try to bring in the hyper-real, what you’re doing is bringing the reader into the space of the lived moment. You’re bringing the reader into the actual space where the character is experiencing this.

I write in the present tense, not the past tense; I write with sometimes quite long sentences, because those sentences are taking you into that living moment. Right down to the heartbeat of the character, right down to the sense of her own consciousness as it meets the world, and when you do that, the reader is experiencing it for themselves. They’re starting to experience pain. They’re starting to experience her pain as though they’re experiencing it for themselves. That’s when empathy – real empathy – becomes possible.

After you won the Booker, you said that Prophet Song was an attempt at radical empathy, particularly for readers in the West to feel like problems they could ignore in other parts of the world – even while they watch it on the news – were also possible at their doorstep. What do you think explains that lack of empathy? It’s not as though the visuals don’t exist.

It’s probably a very complex question to answer, but one dimension is the way that technology has changed us. It’s flattened our bandwidth, and so there’s just less of us available for the world. There’s actually less of us available for ourselves too. And so if you’re not able to be present with yourself, how can you be present for other people? How can you be present for other people who are outside your culture? And so you can see very obviously in the world now, the slide to illiberalism actually represents a dialling down at large of compassion.

At the end of the day, every person is a universe of suffering. Everyone is a universe of feeling, and everybody suffers. It’s the job of art to open us out to that experience.

During your session, you said that you don’t see yourself as a political writer, and that Prophet Song is not a political novel. Where do you draw that line, and why do you think there are limitations to a political novel?

There are people who think that everything in life is political, but when Robinson Crusoe went to that desert island and washed up there, and he finds himself completely isolated, confronted with himself in the cosmos, that’s not political, that’s metaphysical. And that’s what I chase in my novels.

You’ve mentioned several times how you spent a few months writing the “wrong novel” before you started this one. How do you know when it’s time to let something go and it’s just not working?

Well, it’s a very personal question to answer because every artist has their own sense of what works for them and what doesn’t. But for me, I look for a vessel that carries my story out to sea and sails very smoothly. I like storytelling, I want the ideas that I’m chasing to be in the hold of the ship, but the ship to be sailing smoothly. And what I was writing wasn’t moving like a story, and that’s good enough for me. The sunk cost fallacy is really important. You have to know when to stop and when to walk away. Definitely, stopping writing the wrong book was the smartest decision I ever made.

You publish with a small but very successful independent publisher. Would you say the experience of writing and publishing is different based on who you choose to publish with?

The absolute truth of it is that the independent houses were the only people who were publishing me before the Booker prize, because my books don’t hit it down the centre of the court, they play it to the line. They’re looking for the edges. Up until now, I’ve never had this enormous readership, because my books are challenging. In the earlier novels, the language was very challenging. I’ve always written exactly the kind of book that I want to write and no other one, and that’s not going to change.

A lot of the publishing of the corporate publishers now is run by accountants, or at least they have a huge say in  what is published. But the reality is if you look back over the last ten years of say Booker Prize winners and Booker International winners, the vast majority have been won by independent houses. And so that’s because they’re doing the work now, publishing the challenging fictions. The older publishers, the establishment publishers who used to publish those kind of books, aren’t doing so as often as they should.