It’s tempting to connect Limerick-born Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning Prophet Song with the far-right violence that tore up Dublin’s streets, and Lynch’s dystopian take on the almost unnoticed rise of the totalitarian National Alliance does envisage the brutality of a future fascist Irish government. His tale is less about the fragmented internet conspiracy culture alt-right, though, than the breathless claustrophobia of life in a collapsing society as civil liberties erode and civil war breaks out. He is more interested in scenes of a mother dodging snipers as she rushes to see her son in hospital – which echo Gaza, Syria or the Ukraine – than the history that created this failing Ireland. Indeed, the judges referenced the Israel-Hamas war in their decision. Lynch’s oppressive state does rise to crush trade unions, and the choices of the family of one vanished union organiser are the emotional spine of the novel. But what follows is more domestic than political. Eilish Stack, mother of four, faces one impossible decision after another – how can she flee when her father, Simon, who has dementia, is desperate to remain in the house he shared with his wife? Lynch’s pace and filmic style rushes across scenes of middle-class white Europeans crossing the sea as refugees, and leave a lingering sense that there was a little more to explore in this tale than the literary thought experiment he so deftly explored.
