I’m pretty sure that I read Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, and Darkness at Noon in high school—all assigned reading—and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Zamyatin’s We in college. This was fairly conventional cultural-literacy stuff when I was young. The Baby Boom was raised on dystopias, on cautionary tales of totalitarian states, but I’m not sure what we American kids of the 1960s and 70s got out of them, other than a smug sense of superiority. The settings were usually foreign and mostly fantastic. We kids read these stories of repressive, mechanized, top-down regimes, and I suppose we understood them, but we certainly didn’t identify with them. Rather, our lives in the Woodstock era seemed so rich, relatively speaking, and our movies and TV and music so explosively creative and liberating, that our world seemed to be opening up, not closing down. Even the political turbulence and protests of the time suggested that a freer future might be on the horizon. Thus very little of the stuff in those dreary, one-party-state novels seemed to apply to us.
What a difference a half-century makes!
Paul Lynch is an Irish writer, and his most recent novel Prophet Song won last year’s Booker Prize. It’s a dystopian tale for our time that, though quite brutal, should be widely read. I also think that it should be assigned reading for today’s young people, though I expect lots of parents might disagree with me on that. Prophet Song is not exactly enjoyable, but it is completely gripping. Lynch is masterful in gradually building the anxiety and dread in this story to a suitably appalling conclusion. And Prophet Song is realistic, in the sense that what happens is exactly what one would expect to happen given the premise, which is itself plausible. In fact, what happens in Prophet Song is exactly what is really happening in many places in the world today. What is brilliant about this book is its setting: we may be numb to atrocities and repressions and rampant destruction in all sorts of places—in Gaza, in Syria, in Ukraine and Russia, in Venezuela and Turkey and Hungary—but atrocities and repressions and rampant destruction in sweet, pacific, law-abiding modern Ireland makes us sit up and take notice.
Prophet Song does not read like a fantasy or a parable, nor does it feel foreign or far-fetched. Lynch focuses on one family and tells his story from the stream-of-consciousness perspective of his protagonist, Eilish Stack, a 40-ish wife and mother, a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology working in senior management in a biotech firm. We see and hear and feel what Eilish does, told in a hypnotic, breathless prose style that combines description, action, dialog, as well as Eilish’s thoughts and feelings, in headlong run-on sentences and paragraphs that are surprisingly beautiful. I read most of this book aloud to myself.
Prophet Song is set in present-day Dublin, in a world recognizably like ours, with cell phones and laptops and ATM machines, with supermarkets and SUVs and daycare centers, with leafy urban and suburban neighborhoods like ours, with modern kitchens and gardens and backyard grills, with two-income families and professional office jobs. It is a world in which people worry about both their kids and their aging parents. It is a modern, prosperous, Western, English-speaking world in which, for some reason, and rather suddenly, the society has become fundamentally divided, the political situation has become horribly, violently broken, and a new party in power is determined to stifle dissent and eliminate opposition. It is a world like ours in which people expect to be able to call their lawyers and defend their rights in court, in which they expect to call the police when someone has vandalized their car. They expect journalists to report on abuses. They expect news reports to be independent and objective and true. They don’t expect politics to govern their jobs or workplaces. They expect the law to work, until it doesn’t. The need to be fearful in doing the most normal things dawns on them slowly.
Unlike Animal Farm or 1984 or Brave New World, Prophet Song is not a novel of ideas. The characters don’t debate political systems or philosophies. There are no mouthpieces. It is about what happens to one ordinary family when the world around them has undergone a dramatic change. As the novel opens, we learn that a new party has been elected, but the characters still expect the world to function as usual. Larry Stack, Eilish’s husband, is a teacher and an official in the teachers’ union, and he’s preparing for a strike. The new party in power opposes the strike and the police call Larry in for questioning, and Eilish never sees him or hears from him again. Eilish is determined to keep her family together—and to hold on to her job, take care of her declining father, keep her kids fed and get them to school, etc.—while she waits for Larry to be released. It is her paralysis, however, her refusal to acknowledge what is actually happening in the country, that drives all the drama and tension in Prophet Song. Her sister, Áine, who lives in Canada, hires someone at tremendous expense to smuggle the family out of Ireland, but Eilish does not act, cannot conceive of being a refugee, cannot grasp the true gravity of her situation, until it is much, much too late. Eilish is not a stupid woman, but she clings stupidly to hope, that things will get better, as we readers see them getting worse and worse. She behaves, for the most part, unfortunately, how most of us would in the same situation.