Prophet Song

I’ve always been preoccupied with violent political upheaval and its totalitarian aftermath because I'm a ray of sunshine who wakes up every morning looking for a good time. But until 2015 or so, this was just an abstract preoccupation, grounded in neither real experience nor any expectation that anything really bad could ever happen here. For the past ten years, I’ve been expecting and bracing myself for the end of democracy and the liberal civil order in America, and it turns out that I wasn’t wrong, because what the fuck. 

Anyway, speaking of dystopian nightmares, I wrote this review of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song early last year, and just forgot to finish and publish it, so here it is. 

*****

Why yes, I did just read yet another terrifying dystopian novel, even though I don’t need any author’s help with imagining the worst case scenario for world events. In my mind, the worst case scenario is always the most likely. The worst case scenario is my default setting.  

The novel is Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Man Booker Award. Set in a present-day or near future Ireland ruled by a totalitarian regime, it depicts the complete breakdown of social order in the wake of an armed uprising that sparks a civil war. The novel’s protagonist, a scientist and mother of four named Eilish, grows ever more desperate as she struggles to keep her children (including an infant) safe and alive after her husband is detained by the regime, and her teenage sons disappear. Eilish loses her job just as the political situation drives runaway inflation, and she spends her days scouring Dublin for food and supplies, seeking news of her husband and sons, and caring for her elderly father who is in the early stages of dementia and refuses to cooperate in his own care. 

This book is so many things, but I’ll start with one. It’s a character study of a woman pushed past the point of reasonable endurance, each terrible thing piling up until it’s all just about too heavy to bear. With her husband detained and held incommunicado, her teenage children sad and terrified and angry all at once, a new baby demanding all of the things that new babies demand, and her father growing more confused and obstreperous each day, Eilish very likely thinks that things can’t get worse, but of course things can always get worse, and they do. Things get so much worse, and Eilish keeps getting up in the morning and keeps putting one foot in front of the other and keeps doing everything and anything she needs to do to protect her family. 

There’s a very popular social media meme, which goes something like “whatever you think you would have done during the Third Reich just look at what you’re doing now about (A, B, or C crime against humanity) because you’re doing what you would have done.” Glib and smug and reductive like most serious memes, but not altogether wrong, either. Prophet Song asks that question: What would you do - what would any of us do - in impossible circumstances? Would you resist and risk arrest, torture, disappearance, loss of everything you have? Would you collaborate with the oppressors to save yourself or your family? Would you just keep your head down and try to just survive and get through the days until things get better? Maybe things won’t get better. 

The way we spend our time and our money and our energy and our social capital in normal, peaceful times doesn’t even resemble how we’d spend those resources in times of chaos and disorder. Every day I buy things or use things or even throw things away, because it’s a time of plenty and I don’t have to really think too hard about fulfilling needs vs. wants. Yes, I know that this is not the case for everyone, and Prophet Song certainly touches on poverty and injustice - the point is that a time of plenty is just that - a time, a passing event, a temporary condition. In America, our time of plenty has lasted for a relatively long time and has benefited a relatively large number of people - but it could all go away, and when or if it does, things would go downhill with astonishing speed. 

*****

At one point in the novel, Eilish thinks for a moment about the past, about times when other people and other countries were suffering through war, civil strife, oppression, famine - and she remembers how she herself would give a passing thought to those  who were suffering, but then she’d forget about them and get on with her day. She recalls a conversation with her sister in Canada, who says that the world is watching Ireland, and that the terror and oppression won’t stand because the international community won’t tolerate it. Eilish knows better. She knows that the rest of the world will give a passing thought or two to the suffering Irish people, and then they’ll move on. No one is coming to help. If Eilish is to save herself and her family, she has to do it on her own.

*****

When Eilish brings her children on to the smugglers' boat that will spirit the family out of Ireland and on to who knows where, she knows that the world is about to care even less about them than it does about the rest of Ireland. She knows what happens as soon as people leave their country to escape war or violence or starvation or all of the above. She knows that they are no longer citizens but migrants, at the mercy of whatever country might deign to take them in; or more likely, whatever country they can sneak into under cover of darkness. In one desperate moment, Eilish and her family are transformed, no longer people but illegal invaders, part of a faceless herd of poor and dirty and traumatized refugees. Whatever place they go to will try its best to keep them out. 

*****

No longer a prosperous and secure citizen of a safe and peaceful country, Eilish seems to wonder about her past thoughts and prayers for the poor and oppressed around the world. Do they mean anything? Did it make any difference at all that she at least thought about her suffering fellow humans, even if only for a moment? Is anyone in the world thinking about her and praying for her, and does it matter if they are or not?  Is it any help at all to pray or hope or even feel for the people of Israel, Ukraine, Gaza, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Central America, etc.? Most of us don’t have the skills or the wherewithal to actually do anything practical to help people in a war zone or a famine. We can send some money to whatever reputable organization might be able to help alleviate the suffering a little bit. Maybe we can call our representatives in Congress and demand that our government send aid. Or we can pray, or send positive thoughts (same thing). Most of the time it’s all we can do and it’s not much. But it’s not nothing. 

*****

Why Ireland? Well, Lynch is Irish, first of all, so he knows the country and can write about it convincingly. If you’ve been to Ireland in the last ten years or so, and don’t know much about its history, then you might think that it’s the least likely place to descend into cruelty and violence. Lynch knows better. Ireland has a very recent history of bloody violence. Last year, I started listening to The Troubles podcast; and then I picked it up again this year. If you think that Prophet Song’s descriptions of torture and mayhem are exaggerated, then listen to the episodes about Dessie O’Hare or Freddie “Stakeknife” Scappaticci or the Shankill Butchers. Hair-raising. Paul Lynch knows that the Irish are capable of cruelty and violence, and not because of the Troubles, but because human beings are and always have been cruel and violent.

*****

I manage my boss's Twitter account. Yes I know it's called X now but I'll call it whatever I want. I'll call it Herbert or Fred but I'm not calling it X. Anyway I spent five minutes on that aptly nicknamed hellsite this morning, and it was hair-raising. Some jerk - well he's a fairly well known jerk not just a random jerk but I’m not going to identify him - posted his observations about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin and while it was not shocking at all that this particular jerk had nothing but good things to say about Putin, it was absolutely shocking to scroll the comments and see how many people love Putin.  Americans are out here rootin’ for Putin. It’s bananas. 

*****

That’s where I left off last year, right around this time. Trump was fully in the race for the Republican nomination, and I knew that he had about a 90 percent chance of winning it and then at least a 50 percent chance of winning the White House again. I knew this, but I don’t think I really accepted that it could actually happen because I was truly shocked on November 5. Anyway, if you haven’t read Prophet Song, I recommend it very very highly. It is grim and terrifying and infuriating, but also beautiful - not just beautiful writing but beautiful in the way that truth always is beautiful.