Paul Lynch: “The Song of the Prophet”: an attempt at radical empathy

What would a right-wing, neo-fascist takeover in a Western European country look like? And how many basic democratic rights could then suddenly be dismantled? In view of the numerous right-wing electoral successes, more and more people are asking themselves these questions. For Ireland, 47-year-old Paul Lynch fictionalized this in his novel “The Song of the Prophet.” And this book, which won the prestigious Booker Prize last year, really gets under your skin. Everything starts out quite everyday and harmless. When someone knocks on the Stack family’s front door in Dublin in the evening, his wife Eilish doesn’t initially suspect anything bad. Two police officers are at the door and want to speak to her husband, but he is not at home. They are polite and tell him to contact them and then they leave. At this moment, Eilish already has a strange feeling. And that is the harbinger of a tragedy that unfolds from then on, with an escalation that is hard to imagine. A short time later, husband Larry Stack, vice-president of the Irish Teachers’ Union, was arrested at a demonstration and never returned home. “The Song of the Prophet” tells the story of a fascist takeover of power in the near future, which ultimately even leads to a civil war, based on the everyday family life of the left-liberal, petty-bourgeois Stacks.

After the election victory of a right-wing party, civil rights are restricted by means of an emergency decree, a new police force called the Garda National Services Bureau (GNSB) suppresses all criticism, all 16-year-olds are drafted into military service and there will soon be a night curfew. Nobody knows anything precise about the whereabouts of the father, who is probably in an internment camp. Son Mark is about to be drafted and goes into hiding while the mother looks after her other three children and also looks after her father, who is developing dementia. The political event that turns the lives of the family and everyone else upside down over time is linked in this novel to the most banal of everyday life. It will take some time before it becomes clear how drastic the developments are. This can’t last more than a few weeks, says husband Larry at first. It’s only when he’s gone and doesn’t come back that the family realizes how serious everything is. Daughter Molly hangs a white ribbon on a tree in the garden for every day that her father is away, until it is full of ribbons and she stops doing so and withdraws more and more into herself. Eilish’s attempts to find out about her husband’s whereabouts from the police fail. And suddenly a new wind is blowing at your workplace too. More and more colleagues suddenly disappear. Have they been fired? Or fled Ireland?

“The Song of the Prophet” has no paragraph breaks in the text, as if this story were being told without being able to take a breath. And just as breathlessly claustrophobic and under constant tension, Eilish is also at the center of this story. Paul Lynch describes in detail, based on everyday life, how the life of the Stacks in Dublin is eroding. The children’s teacher is suddenly no longer there and is replaced by a new one. More and more people are wearing badges of the new governing party, the National Alliance Party. The Stacks are increasingly being pushed to the margins of society and stigmatized. When the government publishes the names and addresses of deserting teenagers, the Stacks, like hundreds of other families, become the target of a nightly pogrom-like attack in which their car is destroyed, the facade of the house is daubed and the police simply look the other way. In view of the developments in Ireland, other European countries are protesting, the country is isolating itself politically and economically, companies are closing, and unemployment is the result. Eilish also loses her job as a biotech manager. What should she do? Flee to Canada, where her sister lives? She can’t do that as long as she has to look after her father, who has dementia, and her husband or her older son could suddenly come home. Hope dies last.

There is also resistance, but mass protests are brutally suppressed. Rebellious militias soon form and eventually a civil war breaks out, during which the Stacks find themselves in the middle of the front line and their neighborhood is bombed. Past snipers, Eilish takes her injured son to the hospital. Paul Lynch turns the escalation screw of this story to the extreme. Those members of the family who survive this horror ultimately go on the run and cross the sea to England as illegal refugees in a rubber dinghy. Paul Lynch wrote his novel under the impression of an ever-growing right that is mobilizing globally, as well as the civil war in Syria. His book, which he himself described as an “attempt at radical empathy,” is about making the fate of political oppression, war and flight understandable to the reader. Lynch refrains from giving a precise description of the political framework of this shift to the right, which has already earned him criticism. With this trick he manages to make this story directly tangible for the reader. In this respect, this novel becomes more and more disturbing towards the end, even if it allows its characters to feel something like hope in the last paragraph.

Paul Lynch: The Prophet’s Song. Velcro cotta, 320 p., hardcover, €26.

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