Column | Unforgettable novel – NRC

Every once in a while you read a novel that will push many other good novels back to the attic of your memory, where so many books are already yellowing. For me it is Prophet Song by the Irish writer Paul Lynch such a novel. He won the British Booker Prize for it in 2023. This spring it will also be published in a Dutch translation.

An unforgettable book, I knew, as I read the closing sentence carefully again. That line is so typical of Lynch’s lyrical prose that I will quote it in full.

„She looks for Molly’s eyes and cannot find the right words, there are no words now for what she wants to say and she looks towards the sky seeing only darkness knowing she has been at one with this darkness and that to stay would be to remain in this dark when she wants for them to live, and she touches her son’s head and she takes Molly’s hands and squeezes them as though saying she will never let go, and she says, to the sea, we must go to the sea, the sea is life.”

It is an ambiguous ending, because the sea can also be death, especially if you don’t know what awaits you, like the mother, Eilish Stack, who wants to flee with her children, including Molly, from even more war suffering.

Is there still hope, asked The Guardian to Lynch. The writer responded by asking if it was his job to comfort the reader. “I don’t think in terms of endings that are happy or sad, I think about being truthful.”

I had to get used to his meandering sentences, to the pages without paragraphs and with little punctuation, but this style has a clear function here: the language should drag the reader into the vortex in which Eilish’s life has ended up. “Because Eilish doesn’t have room to breathe, the reader shouldn’t have it either,” Lynch said.

It sounds strict, but he is forgiven, because it gives his book a mesmerizing cadence that compels you to continue reading. Prophet Song is sometimes called a dystopian novel because it is about an Irish family that ends up in a civil war after the extreme right seizes power. An atmosphere of threat and intimidation arises, and anyone who does not cooperate is declared dead.

But Lynch doesn’t want to be called a “political novelist,” nor does he like the comparisons 1984 by George Orwell and The Handmaid’s Tale van Margaret Atwood.

He sees in retrospect that current events have more or less overtaken his book (“The extreme right is here, it is small, but it is here”), but that was not so much his concern when writing this book, that he was “a experiment in radical empathy”.

When he started writing it in 2018, he was influenced by the civil war in Syria – and especially by the shocking photo: that of two-year-old refugee Alan Kurdi, washed up dead on a Turkish coast. He then mainly wondered: “Why don’t I feel more about this than I should?”

It inspired him to imagine a family in his own world, Ireland, succumbing to political terror. The mother tries with all her might to keep her family together. She has nothing left but to hope and despair.

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