{"id":10225,"date":"2024-03-27T13:47:44","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T17:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10225"},"modified":"2024-03-27T13:47:46","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T17:47:46","slug":"prophet-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/27\/prophet-song\/","title":{"rendered":"Prophet Song."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Taking his cues from the devastating civil war in Syria, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of populist authoritarian movements in the West, Paul Lynch has crafted a terrifyingly personal dystopian vision in his newest novel, Prophet Song<\/a><\/em>. Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, the book follows the decline into tyranny and civil war of the Republic of Ireland through the eyes of Eilish, a mother of four who tries desperately to hold her family and herself together even as the world around her crumbles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story begins in the not-too-distant future, where an unidentified party has taken control in Ireland and turned the national police (the gardai<\/em>) into state security, choosing labor unions \u2013 especially the teachers\u2019 union \u2013 as their first targets. Larry, Eilish\u2019s husband, is a leader in the teacher\u2019s union himself and after one interrogation finds himself arrested by the national government, disappearing into the state\u2019s growing apparatus for political prisoners and leaving Eilish alone with four kids, ranging from the teenager Mark to the still-nursing Ben. The state gradually increases its authority and rounds up more and more dissidents, even firing on protestors, leading to a near-total breakdown in the social order, food and water shortages along with bread lines, neighbors denouncing neighbors, and the inevitable rise of a ragtag rebel army. All the while, Eilish is trying to keep her family safe, including her father, who is in the early stages of dementia and only half understands what\u2019s happening. Eilish can access some foreign news sources, such as the BBC, to get an outside view of the conflict, and the ubiquity of cell phones changes some of the dynamics of survival, but none of this changes the more fundamental needs to get food, shelter, and medical care, all of which become critical as Eilish has to decide whether to stay or make a dangerous bid to cross the border with Great Britain and join her sister Aine in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s something very It Can\u2019t Happen Here<\/em> about Prophet Song<\/em>; this is the kind of collapse we associate with countries where the populace is mostly non-white \u2013 Syria, Somalia, Yemen, the D.R. Congo, and now Haiti. Lynch\u2019s Ireland goes from an affluent, stable democracy to a police state that resembles the early U.S.S.R. but with the weaponry and technology of modern conflicts. A staid middle-class life sits on a shaky foundation of civil society that, as we\u2019ve seen in the U.S., depends in large part on people not losing their minds and voting for would-be fascists. (Lynch never identifies the party in power by name or ideology, but they are at the least anti-labor; their specific policies aren\u2019t relevant to Eilish\u2019s story and he doesn\u2019t waste time on them.) Hungary had a functioning democracy for a short while, but its people voted in an irredentist autocrat who has gone after two of the most common targets for authoritarian regimes \u2013 Jews and LGBTQ+ people. Venezuela and El Salvador have slid from democracy to dictatorship, with the former\u2019s economy collapsing after its first strongman died. It can happen, but we never dream that it will until it\u2019s too late, often by our own hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

The real power of Lynch\u2019s work is that he focuses exclusively on one family, and one person, rather than telling the story of the collapse of a country. In that way it\u2019s more in the vein of survivalist or post-apocalyptic fiction, like Testament<\/em>, In a Perfect World<\/a><\/em>, and The Road<\/a><\/em> than the standard dystopian novel. The leaders of the country are never named; in fact, no one in any position of authority, not even a police officer, gets a name in Prophet Song<\/em>. Names are reserved for the ordinary people \u2013 Eilish, her family, a few neighbors. This choice makes the book more intensely personal, and becomes its own form of psychological horror \u2013 will Eilish\u2019s family survive another day, and what calamity might lurk around the corner? You can experience the terrors of the police state from the most granular level, where the lights don\u2019t stay on and food is scarce, where you can\u2019t get across town to see your ailing father and you have to worry one of your kids will be arrested or shot for being out past curfew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lynch doesn\u2019t shy away from the inevitable tragedies of his setting; Eilish is fighting a losing battle but refuses to admit it. Even the ending leaves some questions unanswered, and Eilish still isn\u2019t certain if she\u2019s made the right choices for her family, because in that situation you will never have that certainty. Instead, Lynch makes the smart choice to lean into the crises, but move us quickly in and out of them, so the story is never lurid, never ogling Eilish\u2019s misery for the reader\u2019s pleasure. It\u2019s a masterful blending of the dystopian novel, the political thriller, and an exaltation of the power of one person \u2013 of one mother \u2013 to carry the weight of two different generations and somehow make it through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Ann Patchett\u2019s essay collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taking his cues from the devastating civil war in Syria, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of populist authoritarian movements in the West, Paul Lynch has crafted a terrifyingly personal dystopian vision in his newest novel, Prophet Song. Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, the book follows the decline into tyranny and civil war of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1266,684,109,161,682],"class_list":["post-10225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-booker-prize","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-dystopian","tag-highly-recommended","tag-irish-literature","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10226,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10225\/revisions\/10226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}