Paul O’Connor, veteran journalist, reviews a dystopian novel with a timely message about “the madness of the autocratic right.”
Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor
PROPHET SONG. By Paul Lynch. Atlantic Monthly Press. 309 pages. $26, hardcover.
An old man in my neighborhood has a contingency plan in case the world’s current madness gets any closer to his corner of Durham. He’ll use his newly acquired Irish citizenship, if it is approved in time, to emigrate to the Iveragh Peninsula in the remote southwest corner of Ireland, buy a small piece of the land his family owned for 700 years and just read W.B. Yeats and drink Beamish Irish stout for the rest of his days.
Irish novelist Paul Lynch says not so fast. In his 2023 Booker Prize shortlisted masterpiece Prophet Song, he says there’s no guarantee that anyone can escape the madness of the autocratic right, even if they’re raising sheep on the rocky hills of Prior Parish in Sussa Townland, even if Ireland is now considered Europe’s most liberal democracy.
Lynch’s dystopian story begins with a knock on the door of the Stack household in Dublin one night. Two gardai, Irish policemen, want Larry Stack, a labor organizer for the teacher’s union, to visit them down at the station. There’s a big rally for teacher pay raises in the coming days, and the new right-wing, patriots’ party government is trying to suppress dissent.
What follows is a downward spiral as dark as the journey through Dante’s rings of hell. One step at a time, the Stack family is sucked into the vortex of horror that comes with autocracy, rebellion and civil war. The law no longer matters. Human decency no longer matters. Nothing matters.
Eilish Stack has four children, aged 17 to infant. Her husband has disappeared into the Irish gulag. Her son is ordered to report for conscription. Her job is threatened. Her younger children are intimidated at school, and her home and car are vandalized with right-wing graffiti.
She struggles to keep her children focused on their schooling, on good behavior, on optimism. She struggles to keep them fed, to find, in a failing economy, simple things like milk. She struggles to care for her senile father who alternates moments of clarity with days of confusion, and vice versa.
And the rebel forces keep getting closer to her neighborhood. The artillery shells, the helicopter flights, the errant rounds, all violate their corner of the suburbs. Checkpoints appear. Shortages occur. Prices spike. And the family can’t avoid getting deeper into the mess.
As noted above, it would not appear that modern Ireland is in any danger of such a dire fall into autocracy. The population’s casting away of the imperialist British in the 1920s and the casting aside of the heavy-handed Catholic Church in the late 20th Century have created a free and open society with a vibrant democracy.
But Lynch is doing several things here. First, he is writing a reminder to his countrymen that it was not so long ago that Winston Churchill’s black-and-tan paramilitary forces roamed Irish towns abusing anyone they chose in an effort to keep England’s most precious penal farm subjugated.
He’s also warning the Irish of the potential consequences of Europe’s growing right-wing movements. There are small signs of it in Ireland, a country that has been extremely generous and open to political refugees, especially from Ukraine. During recent elections, one party emblazoned its posters with anti-immigration messages such as “Ireland is Full.”
Lynch is also begging his readers to walk in the shoes of the Ukrainian refugees who have flooded into subsidized seaside hotels in such towns as Waterville, upsetting a way of life that has existed for generations. Think about what they have run away from and consider that the world accepted millions of Irish refugees beginning with the potato famine in 1845 and continuing to very recent times. It’s time to pay the world back for the generosity it showed to the Irish emigrants who sailed on coffin ships to escape British-imposed starvation and religious bigotry.
Finally, I’d like to think that Lynch is looking to his American cousins, watching our flirtation with right-wing, autocratic lunacy and saying, look what Eilish Stack is facing, look at what she loses. The appeal to some kind of distant past, with a sanitized depiction of what life was like in “simpler days,” is a lie. Autocracy is repression.
There’s an old saying that American stories have happy endings but that there are no happy endings in Irish stories. The happy ending to this Irish story will be if it never happens at all.