Paul Lynch: The Soothsayer

TO READ PROPHET SONG is to be immersed in a world of en­croaching darkness. Without paragraphs, the only white space on the page is section breaks. The reader is denied both pause and breathing space. But should the reader have respite, when the protagonists in the novel are denied it? Paul Lynch’s answer is a resounding ‘No.’ The 46-year-old Irish author has never written to provide solace, he writes to deliver truths, and he does so in Prophet Song, which tells of a near future Ireland, where democracy is breaking apart, civil liberties are being quashed and citizens are becoming refugees. But this is not an Irish book. It is very much a global book. As the title itself makes apparent, this is a novel that cautions readers about a world in which fascism reigns and rights erode.

It is little surprise that Lynch, author of four previous novels—Red Sky in Morning (2013), The Black Snow (2013), Grace (2019) and Beyond the Sea (2019)—has won the Booker Prize this year. Compared to other books on the shortlist, his was the most ‘political’. And when it comes to deciding the winner, prize-giving juries always seem to favour the urgent and the topical, even while claiming not to. Lynch is the fifth Irish author to win the Booker Prize and there were four authors from Ireland on this year’s longlist. He told reporters he will spend the £50,000 prize money on paying his mortgage.

When he won the Booker Prize on November 26, Lynch said, “This was not an easy book to write, the rational part in me believed that I was dooming my career by writing this novel, though I had to write the book anyway. To quote the apocryphal Gospels, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ My writing has saved me.”

It has been a surreal year for Lynch who was diagnosed with cancer and was on the operating table when he found out he was on the Booker shortlist. The father of two also separated from his wife post Covid. He started writing Prophet Song in 2018, the year he had a newborn son, who is now riding a bicycle. It was the year he had re-read Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Harry Haller, the middle-aged protagonist, is looking at Germany of 1927 and is watching the political chaos, racism and xenophobia unfold. He feels the next war is inevitable. When Lynch read this book in the early 1990’s, in his 20s, he felt removed from it. The 1990s, as he says, were a “banal complacent time”. But when he read it in 2018, he “felt a chill” as he realised “this is what I am looking at now”. He wrote Prophet Song “like an equation,” where the ending (a mother and her children getting on a boat) pulled him through. The novel was his own attempt to ask and answer the question of what would make a parent get on a boat with their children and to leave all that they’ve once known.

Prophet Song is the story of Eilish Stack, the mother of three teenagers and an infant. Her husband works for the teachers’ union of Ireland, the book opens at a moment when the country feels completely like the Ireland of now, but terror hits home when Eilish’s husband ‘disappears’. Eilish must keep her children together, even as her eldest son also disappears, and look after her father who has dementia and stays separately. Slowly, all that is familiar starts to turn, the media is blocked out, followed by curfews and empty supermarkets.

Lynch chafes against the term ‘political novel’ as he believes he is simply, “capturing something of the present moment.” He said in an interview, “The book is fundamentally about what Eilish is trying to do. She is trying to make sense of reality, trying to make sense of a known world when it is no longer known. It is really about grief.”

When Lynch won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, he said that writing is a solitary pursuit, unlike a performer who gets to hear the applause on stage at night. So literary awards are “a bit of a pat on the back from the universe.” Having won the Booker Prize 2023, Lynch hasn’t just got approval, he has secured his place amongst the greats.

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