Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker-winning novel Prophet Song begins with two inspectors of the Garda National Services Bureau knocking at a woman’s doorstep in Ireland late at night. After a brief exchange, in which they imply that her “anti-establishment” husband may be in trouble, the inspectors leave. As she closes the door to her house uneasily and yet with a certain relief, the protagonist, Eilish, finds herself by the window watching outside. The “darkening garden” outside becomes a dreadful sight, because “something of that darkness has come into the house.” Prophet Song, then is, from this first scene, a novel that allows darkness a corporeal form – something that breaches thresholds and follows.
Home and the World
The darkness that follows is not only a thing of the novel’s narrative universe. As the story unfolds, it is clear that this is also the darkness of our own world and time. Children’s hospitals being bombed, houses of minorities being demolished, detainment of political dissenters – all of these events are too familiar to us… There is hardly anything “dystopian” about Lynch’s narrative universe, even though it has been called so. Perhaps it is our collective ignorance – the unsettling novel suggests – that allows us to think that genocide is a local or regional issue. Prophet Song violently shakes us out of that illusion, and simultaneously redeems one’s faith in the incredible power of art to reveal the festering rot of the society.
At the heart of Lynch’s novel is a breathless passage about how the “end of the world is always a local event.”
“… the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore…”
It is this presumably perfect binary between the Self and the Other and/or the Home and the World that the novel breaches. The personal and the political collide in the most scintillating manner in the novel, as the violence of totalitarianism wreaks havoc on an unsuspecting family. And this is the strength of the novel, to reveal to the readers their own ignorance and privilege. All “local” ends of the world, it asserts, are really universal.
The world’s derision
One of the most daunting challenges of art is to be seen for what it is. Between interpellations and interpretations, the meanings that we ascribe to artworks become more convoluted than they are intended to be – or otherwise. Which is also to say that art is also easily informed by the persisting “regime of truth,” as Michel Foucault suggested. But Lynch confronts the problem by telling the story as it is. There is a desolation in the prose: The sentences are often structured in a way where the action precedes the subject; almost as if you are looking at the event, not reading about it. The novel forces you to witness the illogic violence and banality of totalitarianism. The language itself is ingeniously broken – although never ungrammatical – and schizophrenic. After all, how can language sustain its structures and semantics in a broken world? When the centre does not hold, all comes crashing down.
In its uncanny and compounded writing, the novel also perfectly engenders the mindspace of its protagonist. Eilish, a mother of four children – including an infant – is suddenly thrown into an unknown, desolate world when her husband mysteriously vanishes one day. Her previously ordinary life is vehemently replaced by the everydayness of loss, fear, paranoia and numbness. Eilish represents the unseen victims of political vendetta and intimidation – the families of those incarcerated under absurd, draconian laws like UAPA in India.
Some of the most hard-hitting scenes in the novel are when Eilish is in a sort of trance, in which she cannot think or access her own body and emotions. She seems to be looking at herself from the outside. Her relationship with her body changes, wherein she is only a shell, an emptiness, and her life seems to be happening at some unfathomable distance. This is achieved so masterfully in Lynch’s language, which is always dissociated… almost in a state of shock about the reality of the situations in this totalitarian regime, but witnessing it regardless with an urgent disconnection of the mind. Esi Edugyan, Chair of the 2023 Booker judges, has lauded the book for its atmosphere of “sustained claustrophobia,” and it is through truly astounding gymnastics of language that Lynch performs – pushing language to its limits – to achieve that effect.
The prophets’ songs
It may not be incorrect to suggest that in the wake of cataclysmic global events, apathy has become a staple response for the “unaffected.” We seem to have more moral compunctions about the way an oppressed group responds to state-sanctioned violence than the state-sanctioned violence itself. In the Israel-Palestine conflict, for instance, I have heard people talk about “nuanced history” and “unverifiable facts.” Also that the conflict is so distant for them (geographically and politically) that they find it irrelevant to have an opinion about it. Millions of refugees and more than 18,000 murdered (as of early December) do not affect us between our nine-to-fives.
The overexposed hyperreality we live in has somehow convinced us that life is too short to be so angry about everything. That apathy should be normalised because it’s better than “armchair activism.” Recently someone on the Internet also pointed out that “Free Palestine” placards at Delhi Pride parade were redundant. The participants were told to pick their battles. Prophet Song reminds us that this choice is not real. In its unblinking courage, this is a book that asks to be looked in the eyes. How do we decide when the personal becomes political – and vice versa? There is truly no distinction, Lynch suggests. And I think this is the function of literature and art: To slap us in the face and wake us up from our apathy and complicity.
Every year, as a writer wins the Booker or a Nobel Prize, we rush to read their books, find out how they perceive the world. Suddenly we are thrown into an Irish wasteland, a Norwegian desolation, a Sri Lankan battlefield. A short-lived, trend-spotting curiosity. To tell the truth as it is, is an increasingly rare feat in our world, where eminent international dailies have resorted to coining phrases like “fragile lives found ended” to refer to the children being murdered in a harrowing genocide. One hopes the jarring warnings of Prophet Song live on, and resound and haunt us with their music.
Kartik Chauhan writes about stories that pry open the world around him and works in publishing. He is on X @karteakk and on Instagram, @karkritiques.