A far-right government, the National Alliance Party (NAP), has just come to power in the Republic of Ireland. It promises protection, order, security, and war on every opponent. A dark foreboding spread through the streets of Dublin, schools in Cork, offices in Limerick, and construction sites in Galway.

[Eilish’s] hand is searching the bedside locker, she takes hold of a glass of water without looking and takes a drink. Larry, how much of our constitutional rights can they suspend under these emergency powers?

In Prophet Song, Ireland, painted by Paul Lynch, is not a dystopia but a likely possibility. The novel explores how close a dystopia might be to our present. Lynch creates an interactive narrative that crumbles any certainty of a time lived with inertia. His book delves into the deepest recesses of the individual and collective psyche, posing an anguished question: How much are we willing to sacrifice in the face of fear, lest we succumb to dictatorship?

Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize and a finalist for the 2024 European Strega Prize, Prophet Song is a verisimilitude of possibility.

A familiar story

As a new government takes office in the Parliament of Ireland, the Stack family observes the situation and becomes informed and aware. Larry Stack is a teacher and deputy secretary of the teachers’ union, and Eilish Stack is a molecular biologist. They live in Dublin with their four children, Molly, Bailey, and baby Ben. Two GNSB (Garda National Service Bureau) agents arrive at the door one evening. They want to talk to Larry. The union is already organizing a demonstration against the rising government. Soon after, however, a colleague of Larry’s, Jim Sexton, suddenly disappears after an interrogation with the GNSB.

Eilish quickly realizes that the eye of the NAP has already spotted its targets and knows how to deal with them. She will also understand this on her skin when she is deprived of her job, ostracized from the neighborhood, and excluded from social life. She intuits that soon, every choice will be decisive. But how can one decide?

Eilish’s father suggests going to Canada, where her sister Áine lives. But the daughter does not want to uproot her children from their land. From these crossroads comes a question for the reader, “You, in the face of all this, what would you do?”.

Fantasy narrative but not science fiction

One of the aspects Lynch focuses on is the family’s initial reaction to the change.

“The world that Eilish has known all his life is dissolving – the author says to Rai Cultura – The problem is not just that everything is ending, but it’s recognizing what’s happening because we all see the videos, we all see the documentaries, and we think: I would have noticed, I would have left. But I asked myself the question, ‘Would you have?’ I don’t think so. Because life is too complex, we are immersed in the mechanisms of our lives, and it is often too difficult to pick up the signs.”

The dystopia of the Prophet Song manifests the unexpected, concretizing an imaginary that did not seem possible. Reflection thus falls back on the fictional nature of the novel itself: fantasy narrative, yes, but not science fiction. Everything is tremendously concrete in Paul Lynch’s work. The blood, the rubble, and the dead are real, and the survivors’ wounds continue to hurt. It is far from unforeseen, but instead, the title suggests, the fulfillment of a prophecy.

The link to historical events

“There is also the aspect of denial in this book,” as further explained by Lynch to Rai Cultura. “Eilish denies what is happening because she believes that the world she has known all her life will continue, which is very dangerous. At one point, her sister on the phone tells her that the story is a list of those people who couldn’t leave in time, so you have to leave, but Eilish tells her, ‘It’s easy for you, but I’m at home, Molly, my daughter, is playing field hockey, Mark is gone, my husband has been arrested, and my father is alone. How can I leave?’ We are immersed in the complexity of our lives, which is the complexity that Song of the Prophet tells.”

Larry believed that an authoritarian government was unthinkable in a parliamentary country. Yet, in a short time, a state’s emergency in crisis allowed for a silent coup. Europe, at first, does not even notice what is happening. Lynch peels back the veil that hides the reality of how totalitarianism was born in the 20th century, from the Reichstag and the Matteotti murder. The repression of the NAP and the disappearance of trade unionists and opponents recall tragic historical events.

The ambiguity between reality and fiction

While reading, it is natural to wonder how the international community would react. Lynch maintains an ambiguity between reality and fiction: Europe seems powerless and indifferent to suppressing civil rights. Its actions are limited to symbolic sanctions and vain moral gestures.

Thinking about what we would have done in the Stacks’ place becomes immediate. Would we have run away or stayed? Would we have resisted like Eilish or fought like Mark? Or would we have left with a conscience, as sister Áine suggested?

Says the neighbor to Eilish:

Why should we leave? he says, tell me that, they won’t get us out, we will live underground if we have to, I’ll dig a hole in my fucking garden, if you’ve lived in one place all your life the idea of living someplace else is impossible, it’s what do you call it, neurological, it’s wired into the brain, we’ll just dig in, that’s what we’ll do, what else are you supposed to do anyhow, I don’t know where else I’d go, they can drag me out in a coffin.

What is the prophecy of the title?

As in many horror films, when we wonder why a character opened that door or a family moved into an abandoned house in an old cemetery, the Prophet Song recounts the horror of an everyday life overwhelmed by an entirely plausible dystopia. But unlike many horror films, it is drawn from actual events. Lynch is inspired by the civil war in Syria, ravaged by bombings and political and economic crises. But he doesn’t limit himself to that: while images of conflicts in countries such as Senegal, Palestine, or Lebanon do not shake the certainties of Western liberalism, Lynch sets his dystopia in his own liberal country of Ireland to show that even a nation considered stable can fall into such an abyss.

If the Stack family seems to downplay the dangers, it is not out of superficiality but because they cannot conceive of a radical change in their current situation. Their reality was an unchanging system: home ownership, educated children, secure jobs, and vacations abroad.

Lynch challenges these certainties, making us question the stability of our political systems, freedoms, and choices. Raw and direct realism, like his writing, makes this possible.

Exhausted writing: Lynch’s style reads Flaubert

The Prophet Song overturns all mannerisms, twisting the environments in which the characters move. The quest for realism emerges at various points in the narrative, with Gustave Flaubert as the author’s stated model. Interiors are meticulously described but alternate with a frantic and desperate stream of consciousness, reflecting Eilish’s breathlessness. Minimal punctuation creates a stylistic claustrophobia, trying vainly to find a break.

This technique allows us to connect with Eilish’s emotions but leaves us with a sense of disagreement toward his choices. Perhaps this makes the Prophet’s Song an empathetic and heartbreaking novel: a possible story that affects us closely.

She wakes to the sound of war come like some visiting god, a hammering fury that brings out a hammering in her heart, she cannot find the light switch, her hand padding blindly until she finds it fallen behind the bedside table. There is nothing to see outside but a lone gull pearled in blue light on a chimney top, a gauze of fine rain. Every dog in the area is baying at the noise as she pulls the window closed, looking down at Ben, the puckish smile on the sleeping face, the small fists surrendered above his head. She cannot find her dressing gown and unhooks Larry’s from behind the door, her hand is caught in the sleeve and cannot push through. She moves through the house trying to see ahead, the world branching into impossibility, the dread thing visible in the growing light from the kitchen window, two columns of dark smoke adrift over the south suburbs, a helicopter gunship nearby, she cannot guess how far, perhaps three or four kilometres away.

No one can remain indifferent to what is about to happen to Eilish’s family and the entire country. Even from the first pages, we sense that the story may touch us more closely than we imagine.