Book Review
Prophet Song (2023)
by Paul Lynch
Every year there are a few Booker Prize nominees who see their US publication delayed until after the announcement of the longlist, shortlist or winner. It's a frank admission that a Booker nomination is the best thing a writer of fiction from outside the United States can have to appeal to an American audience. I would guess its the difference between logging low hundreds of sales vs thousands, based on my experience with independent music.
My money this year was on The Bee Sting, by another Irish author, but of course, I couldn't read Prophet Song without buying a UK copy, so I couldn't fairly judge. Prophet Song is a work of political fiction with a lowercase "p" about a near-future Ireland making a slouching decent into EU style bureaucratic fascism. The narrator is Eilish Stack, a health care industry analyst married to an Irish trade-union official- a quasi-governmental role in normal times. Her husband is disappeared in the opening chapters, leaving the mother-of-four to face the encroaching future alone.
What Prophet Song mostly reminded me of were the opening sequences of Children of Men, where Clive Owen is struggling with day-to-day life amidst the collapse of a tottering regime. It's clear to see the appeal of Prophet Song to the Booker panel- this book is both political with a small p- the best kind of political in literary fiction AND a big P in its depiction of a nascent fascist state. It is both domestic- a single mother of four narrator/protagonist AND highly literary in style- with paragraphs that go one for pages at a time. In other words, it is the perfect Booker winner and another example of how the expansion of eligibility- Irish books were first included in 2018 and Americans and other non-Commonwealth authors published in the UK became eligible in 2014- has impacted the nominees and winners.
Most of what I enjoyed in Prophet Song were here face-to-face interactions with the people working for this new, fascist government- referred to as "the party" throughout. It reminded me of my own interactions with government officials within the criminal justice system. I've often thought that it would be easy enough for many of these people to enforce injustice as so-called justice, and this book seems to be exactly about that observation.
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