'Prophet Song' a painful dirge – singing a warning

The most dramatic and, indeed, catastrophic events can begin almost imperceptibly, as a glacial ice sheet melting away or 2023 becoming the hottest year on record, adding to the list of prior years being the hottest ever. For Eilish, a scientist working for a technology company in a bit-in-a-future Dublin, Ireland, the election of rightest nationalists two years before the start of Paul Lynch’s haunting Booker Prize winning 2023 novel is that event.

As “Prophet Song” opens, everything is normal for this mother of four, her oldest son a high school senior, her youngest still nursing. Sure, she is worried about her aging father, his memory slipping. Husband Larry, a leader in the national teacher’s union, becomes a concern after two plainclothes police detectives knock on their door, asking for him, asking that he come to the station for questioning.

Larry does go to the local station of the secret police. By the end of the chapter he is out of the book, disappeared, though Eilish will not know that for some time.

All realizations come slowly to Eilish. The reader sees the world through her, subtly cued by the chapters lack of paragraphs and quotation marks, whichever character speaks. Each chapter is a block of black text cascading down on itself.

Eilish is an everywoman, keeping the family together as Ireland descends into civil war and society crumbles. School, groceries, meals, the children sharing her bed during nightly gunfire and shelling are the center of her world.

Work becomes politicized as staff loyal to the government are promoted and critics let go.

Eilish starts smoking again, another poison in her system. She navigates between being quiet and getting along and wearing white, symbolic of the resistance, and going to rallies. The union’s lawyer finally counsels on Larry: “We must hope he is still in detention, there’s nothing to do now but keep on hoping.” There is no rule of law. There is only ruling.

Eilish leaves, thinking, how many people have been made to disappear? She sees “a black hole opening before us, we have passed the boundary of escape and even when the regime has been overturned the black hole will continue to grow so that it will consume this country for decades.”

Her father knew this earlier, telling her, “You cannot put a stop to the wind and the wind is going to blow right through this country.”

Violence escalates on both sides. Her family is marked. The car is vandalized and urinated on, the windshield smashed.

Then, “TRAITER” is sprayed twice on her house, a subtle, brilliant point the author makes, the forces of reaction cannot even spell.

Eilish gazes on six neighboring houses with the national flag in their windows. She “sees now how everything shall be known, how they shall be judged within the community, they watched what happened last night and will not say a word.”

The story becomes one of escape, to get across the border. This white European family are now third world refugees. Lynch took the tragedy in Syria as his model but the setting is Ireland, not Gaza, not Ukraine, not Sudan. “It” can happen here.

Eilish loses every male in her family. Mark joins the resistance. Twelve year old Bailey is arrested, tortured and murdered because the state can do that. Her father escapes to Canada where another daughter lives.

Almost every scene is filtered through Eilish’s eyes or heard by her. She moves, not quite in a daze, but dulled to life, thinking only of saving her remaining children.

At the end, she crosses into Northern Ireland but not safety, only more despair and darkness with an occasional assistance from some compassionate soul. There is not certainty or deliverance but an amazing page long sentence finishing: “the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”

Here, in the United States, we think, “It can’t happen here.”

“It” – fascism – can happen here.

Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” is probably most famous for its title, now so common it is a cliche.

Lewis is a more entertaining read than Lynch, but both offer the same conclusion: Fascism can happen here.

The Booker Prize is the highest British literary award given annually to a novel written in English.