Booker winner brought to book: 'Prophet Song', by Paul Lynch — an alibi text for tyrants?

Months ago, after its longlisting for the 2023 Booker prize, I predicted that Paul Lynch's 'Prophet Song' would win due to the succour it offers those seeking to deny that de Covid was a global coup.

‘Tyranny? I see no tyranny!’

The 2023 Booker winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is under several headings a vastly admirable book, but there is something deeply odd about it: it is a book about a dystopian coup that takes down Ireland’s ‘liberal democracy’ — just not about the dystopian coup that was actually happening at the time it was written.

By definition, most novels are stories rendered from imagined events, set in past, present or future. But there are occasional examples of novels that are fictionalised accounts of real events — almost always, by definition, from the past, and rather contradictorily termed ‘non-fiction novels’ — as well as imagined vistas from the future, almost always dystopias, most famously George Orwell’s 1984.

But what are we to make of a novel depicting a fictional dystopia composed while a real dystopia was unfolding outside the window of the room in which it was written? ‘Untruthful fiction,’ perhaps, or ‘novelised evasion’. For Prophet Song, the fifth novel by the Irish writer, Paul Lynch, is likely to establish its author’s reputation, though not as the 21st century’s Orwell or Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn. A novel about an imagined dystopia, written during the infancy of an actual dystopia, is surely a fascinating concept in potential (perhaps the plotline of a novel), but also a different yardstick by which the book must be judged than if the actual dystopia had not occurred.

Prophet Song is a book of which it might be said that the standard publisher’s indemnifying blurb in the front matter, promising that ‘This is a work of fiction’, was perhaps never quite so true. Mostly written in the recent years during which the world was subject to a globalist coup imposed by formerly democratic governments, it depicts instead a coup, occurring solely in Ireland, imposed by a ‘far right’ populist insurgency.

In shortlisting the book in September, the Booker judges declared:

‘Paul Lynch’s harrowing and dystopian Prophet Song vividly renders a mother’s determination to protect her family as Ireland’s liberal democracy slides inexorably and terrifyingly into totalitarianism. Readers will find it timely and unforgettable. It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.’

In reviewing the book, the Telegraph gushed that the book was ‘being touted as “Ireland’s 1984.”’ The difficulty is that Ireland’s real life 1984 was already playing out, and, though resonating dissonantly and recurrently with the content of Prophet Song, might be termed the ideological antithesis of the coup depicted by Lynch. Ireland’s ‘liberal democracy’ had already slid inexorably and terrifyingly into totalitarianism, though not at the hands of right-wing populists — rather, at the hands of actors claiming to be liberal democrats, implementing tyrannical decrees handed down from undemocratic agencies upon high, in the spurious name of public health.

Here was a dystopia that locked people into their homes and allowed them out only for short periods of daily exercise, subjecting them to violent arrest if they demurred; that forced growing children to stay home, away from other children, save for short periods each day; that insisted the elderly be left to die alone, severed from the support and affections of their families, helped on their way with overuse of lethal sedatives; that demanded the wearing of synthetic gags to cover the human mouth and nose at all times in public; that threatened people with unemployment and/or exclusion from society for declining to accept into their bodies an untested experimental medicine imposed with the full weight of state coercion, regardless of medical history or personal conscience, creating a cultural apartheid as between those who had taken it and those who had not. There was, in short, no shortage of dystopian material outside Paul Lynch’s window had he chosen to lift the blinds, and it could scarcely be said that this actually existing reality lacked for action or plot potential.

These circumstances render Prophet Song one of the strangest books of all time — not so much for its content as for what it does not contain. It is strange for its Nelsonian knowledge and contrived ideological purblindness. It is strange for its timing and its utter absence of irony concerning its own evasions. A still more intriguing aspect is that none of the mainstream reviews of Prophet Song have adverted to these strange circumstances (with the exception of an article that invokes the book’s content by Eilish O’Hanlon in the Telegraph earlier this week), instead extolling the book’s ‘warnings of the potential woes of a modern-day fascist purge’ and its ‘darkly important message about a particular moment in time,’ without referring to the fact that the woes had already unfolded and the ‘important message’ had come all too late. ‘We would do well not to look away,’ trumpeted the Guardian, seemingly oblivious that ‘we’ already had, or perhaps that ‘we’ had been looking all the while but had declined to understand what ‘we’ were seeing.

In other words, the 2023 winner of the Booker prize for the best novel in the English language has the distinction of depicting the unfolding of a fictional dystopia that has not and is unlikely to occur, whereas, even in the course of its writing, its author was presented with the option of depicting an actually existing dystopia in the process of unfolding in the streets outside his writing room, but chose to spurn this for considerations — who can say? — of ideology, commerce or career.

I have been tracking the book’s progress since it was longlisted for the prize back in the late summer, having read it more or less straightaway. Some three months ago, I wrote here that I hoped Prophet Song would win the Booker prize, thouth not out of goodwill for the book or its author. ‘It is important that we go though this,’ I suggested, ‘that we suffer the wriggling, equivocations and evasions that will follow the canonisation of a book because it indicts populist nationalism at a moment when our civilisation is under threat from an oligarchic globalism which has covered its progress with scare stories about populist nationalism, and which has temporarily bought the silence of all our functioning institutions — including the artistic ones — to enable it get its project over the line. As with so many aspects of what is happening, only shame will function to effect a mending of hands. And, in a sense, it will be entirely apposite if Paul Lynch carries off the £50,000 cheque, since the original name for what became the ‘Booker Prize’ — from its inception in 1969, until 2001 — was ‘the Booker Prize for Fiction.’

The dominant focus of the book is the earthly purgatory of Eilish, a wife and mother trying to keep her family together while her husband, Larry, is incarcerated — on account of his work as a trade unionist — by a government with democratic pretensions, but with constant intimations of some kind of nationalist authoritarian bent. Larry has attracted the attentions of the Irish secret police, the GNSB (Garda National Services Bureau), acting on behalf of the National Alliance, a sketchily drawn populist junta, which has dismantled Irish democracy and declared an Emergency under an Emergency Powers Act (that bit is pretty realistic!), though these aspects are blurry, with the in-focus aspects being generally the intimate, domestic ones. The story is engaging but also enraging, as you begin to suspect that Lynch has set out to sidestep the issue of the totalityranny going on under his nose, partly by locating his story in the intimate rather than the public realm, and partly by drawing very broad strokes to create a kind of fog of authoritarianism on the outside, bearing in. He achieves this by avoiding absolute realism and creating a kind of comic-strip atmosphere in which the characters have full play to function as realish people, and yet appear to exist in some kind of ironic bubble in which nothing seems to be exactly naturalistic, and in which you are never allowed to forget that you are ‘reading a novel.’

Aside from the ethical aspects of the book’s subject-matter, it is in some respects incoherent. Its central motif being the oppression of a trade unionist, for example, is nonsensical in the terms of real life post-2020, when the entire trade union movement fell in behind an unprecedented freedom-grab by the ‘liberal’ establishment on behalf of invisible/unknown outsiders bearing nothing but ill-will towards Ireland, or indeed any country you might name. The result was leftists marching against citizens marching for freedom, clamouring for medical apartheid in the matter of an untested crypto-vaccine, and ultimately demanding the suspension of the Nuremberg Code to permit governments and pharmaceutical corporations to mass-inject whole populations with said crypto-vaccine, an experimental substance that had revealed itself as potentially deadly to human beings from virtually the moment of its launch at the start of 2021. Moreover, Lynch’s trade unionist, Larry, is a teacher-turned-trade-unionist, representing other teachers, a profession that has been among the most acquiescent with the abuses of the past 45 months and counting. Not only did schools and teachers, in general, try to force masks, and even the murderous so-called ‘vaccines’ on their pupils, but they also managed, in this dark period of Irish life and culture, to stand idly by when attempts were being made to impose within the education system (even more disgustingly — in the name of ‘freedom of expression’) a programme of pornographic filth that was self-evidently the thin end of an extreme paedophiliac agenda. The best defence I could recommend to Paul Lynch would be for him to admit that his politics are at least 30 years out of date, and throw himself on the mercy of the court.

He does, to a degree, try to pull his punch, as though to dilute the power of the book’s central motif, perhaps out of some niggling reservation concerning its absurdity. In the early chapters, I presumed his depiction of a nationalist-populist coup was being soft-focussed with a view to zooming in as we went along, and would later get to delivering close-ups of the personalities and ideas that bear down upon his central characters. But that never happens — the spectre of right-wing nationalist tyranny remains just that, a spectre, like a video game playing in the background, delivering curfews and ultimatums and food shortages and draft mandates and summary executions, but never acquiring a face or a voice. Nowhere in the book is there more than a couple of half sentences hinting at the ideological basis of the insurgency, and everyone in the book is apolitical in one way or another. I’m not sure whether this is a deliberate late attempt by the author to duck the issue of his chosen tyranny’s filigreed nature at a moment when it was being subjected to radical real-life competition (though without endangering the book’s marketing or publicity strategy), or simply a device to highlight the domestic impact of the horror depicted. It is as though the ideological background is in black and white, and the lives of the family at the centre of the story happen in colour. This is all perfectly legitimate, stylistically speaking. The problem is that art does not happen in a vacuum whereby it can ignore the reality into which it speaks.

Imaginatively, Prophet Song is a magnificent achievement, powerful on its own flawed terms. If the scamd€mic had never happened and it could be regarded purely as ‘fiction,’ it would be harmless, a little cautionary in a broad-stroke futuristic kind of way, and worthy of critical approval and even prizes. It fails not as fiction, but as literature, a different species, rooted in reality and truth and — yes — prophecy.

Sometimes, Lynch’s insight into the nature of the existential shock of an event such as he depicts is quite devastating. Which of us who have endured these past 45 months of horror could not relate to this description of the uncomprehending early response of Eilish to the abduction of her husband and the attendant brutally altered nature of reality?:

She finds herself breathless, seeking upward for air, moving into the living room, seeking something within her thinking as she picks up the remote and finds a news channel and puts it on mute. This sense now she is living in another country, this sense of some chaos opening, calling them into its mouth.

Since I came across and read the book, I have been all but certain it was going to win, as much as for its objective quality (on its own intrinsic terms, and as a piece of writing), as for the reason that it (unwittingly?) provides the establishments of our societies with a kind of alibi for their involvement in an actual authoritarian ‘event’ that is arguably the most total and egregious in the entire history of Western civilisation. In some respects, the bestowing of the Booker prize on such a book might be seen as an elaboration of the avoidance that has attended the deep meaning of this event — after all, if we still give prizes to fictional conceptions of totalityranny, we must still be the democratic West!

The tragedy of Prophet Song derives from its fatal flaw: its timing and consequent relationship to external reality. This is the disqualifying factor in respect of any attempt to elect Lynch the ‘new Orwell,’ as already mooted by some of his colleagues. When the sky is falling, it is hardly a cause for approbation when someone shouts a warning about a possible imminent thunderstorm. Orwell’s 1984 caught the public imagination in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s because its dreads were all in the future. But is there merit in depicting a futuristic dystopia if an actual present one has already made landfall?

The nagging ache delivered by the book is the constant sense that the author clung to a prior media talking-point — the populist ‘threat’— even though, for all intents and purposes, what was happening around him while he was writing it was close to the opposite: a previously liberal society sliding into authoritarianism because of the venality and cowardice of liberals generally and liberal politicians in particular.

Accordingly, Prophet Song amounts to a kennel-full of dogs not barking, which is to say that, outside of its own intrinsic workings, it could be viewed as a piece of unmitigated propaganda. There is a chance — I freely acknowledge — that this is entirely unwitting and happenstantial — perhaps the author was so immersed in his work that he did not notice the kicks he received trying to access the supermarket without his face-nappy? — but even more astounding is that a book like this can be received by an entire culture in which everyone, including the camp commandants of the lockdown, are able to speak about its ‘prophetic qualities’ with straight faces. The Irish Deputy Prime Minister (Tanaiste), one of the most disgusting Irish tyrants of the Covid era tweeted his congratulations to Lynch on winning the Booker Prize: ‘A remarkable and well deserved achievement for your absorbing and brilliant novel 'Prophet Song.’

Perhaps, it will be argued, Lynch may have been seeking to protect his book from cultural attack — from cancellation, even — and so disguised his theme to have it seem something like its opposite ideological iteration? And yes, it is (if only theoretically) possible that, in presenting a vague spectre of rightist populism rather than the left-liberal totalitarianism that was actually gaining ground, he might well have justified the use of a coded device, in the tradition of literary obliqueness that has so often required to be called into service in times of extreme political oppression. But these attempts at absolution are purely theoretical, for their defences are destroyed by the existence of Lynch’s ruminations in advance of the writing process. Before he put finger to keyboard to begin his novel, he published a prospectus of Prophet Song by which it can now be measured:

I thought about Brexit, Trump, and the forces gathering on the horizon: The Freedom Party in Austria. The National Front in France. The People’s Party in Denmark. Golden Dawn in Greece. Jobbik in Hungary. Law and Justice in Poland. Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. A tectonic shift was occurring in western democracies. I thought, too, about the implosion of Syria and the west’s largely indifferent response to its refugee crisis. The citizen’s regret is the novelist’s calling. I wanted to understand where all this might lead.

I began to wonder what Ireland would look like with a populist government. I wondered, too, what it would be like to live in a democracy drifting towards tyranny. I asked myself, how much power can an individual wield when caught within such an enormity of forces? Prophet Song took shape as a dystopian novel set in our own time.

All this reads now as so much newsroom water-cooler guff among a bunch of lefty journalists awaiting the latest press release from the government press office. Or, perhaps, a far more ominous possibility, Lynch still thinks it a fearless summary of the parlous state of European democracy, going on for four years into a globalist coup. As he sat at his writing post in 2020 and 2021, he would not have needed to look distantly to the horizon to find inspiration for the imagining of how it might be to live in a democracy drifting towards tyranny — with nary a populist in the frame. In the circumstances in which we find ourselves now — with Irish bloggers and tweeters, not trade unionists, threatened with imprisoment for ‘hate speech’ — the stench of avoidance about this book is impossible to ignore, because our civilisation, and not just the Irish part of it, is in actual real and present danger, if indeed it is not already too late for a salving intervention.

The story told in Prophet Song is dark, disturbing and compelling, but it is founded on an untruth, told at a moment when the truth was clear to be understood. Its ‘cautionary tale’ is therefore based on a bogus claim concerning a threat that does not exist other than in the manipulative imaginations of truly dark actors, the very forces presenting the real and actual threat overshadowing the three-dimensional world beyond the pages of Paul Lynch’s book. The skill with which Lynch depicts the human aspects of the authoritarian clampdown is actually all the more maddening for its veracity and verisimilitude — great creative skills misused in acts of misdirection, trivialisation and avoidance.

Of course, there is nothing in Ireland even distantly resembling a ‘populist’ or ‘far right’ party, but this does not mean the phenomenon lacks a central role in Irish politics: It does — as the fabricated toxic tagline of an establishment seeking to summon up an imaginary ‘out group’ to galvanise the corrupt in-group of politicians, doctors, scientists, journalists, police, judges and others who helped to pull off the Covid coup from the spring of 2020 and now seek to cover up their crimes as people fall ill and die from the ‘cures’ they mandated in respect of a non-existent pandemic. In other words, any Irish person depicted as ‘far right’ is almost certainly someone who has been questioning or criticising government policy over the past 45 months. The week before last, for example, an incident in which three small children and their adult minder were attacked and stabbed in a Dublin street by a crazed migrant to Ireland, was followed hard by protests involving rioting and looting that caused mention of the children to disappear from the news the following day. This episode falls snugly into the model of manipulation utilised by the Irish police force, An Garda Siochána (Guardians of the Peace!), during the lockdown period, when the objective was clearly to infiltrate public demonstrations against the unfolding tyranny and spark roughhouse behaviour so as to justify a state reaction, all for the benefit of the purchased media’s cameras. Over last weekend, video footage emerged showing uniformed riot police breaking plate glass shop windows in Dublin to make things easier for the looters they had lined up to discredit those who have challenged the government’s insane migration policies, whereby it advertised all over the world for would-be migrants to Ireland, promising houses or five-star hotel accommodation, benefits and other inducements, to any supposedly impecunious alien making his way to the Emerald Isle. Some two out of three of alleged ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ throw away their identification documents before presenting themselves to the Irish immigration authorities.

Within minutes of the start of the orchestrated rioting and looting in Dublin, the politicians and their proxies were out screaming ‘fahr right!, fahr right!’ as they sought to raise a mini-pandemic of fear about jackbooted neo-nazis stomping on the street’s of Ireland’s capital, so as to refloat their briefly-shelved project to introduce one of the most draconian piece of ‘hate speech’ legislation the world has ever seen —  this having been stymied by international comment and some domestic parliamentary reticence during the past summer. Just over two years ago, research by ‘far-left’ media organisation, Politico, revealed that the level of ‘far-right’ activity in Ireland was . . . absolutely zero. And yet, the lies continue to flow, now to be provided with added credibility by a Booker-prizewinning novel. This is the context in which I choose to see Prophet Song: an alibi provided to radicaly authoritarian and fascistic criminality by someone who is either ideological naïve or prepared to debase his not inconsiderable talent in the interests of furthering his career.

Worse, the author claims he had no political intention in writing the book: ‘I did not set out to write a political novel but to tell a story fundamentally about grief.’

This would be fair enough in peacetime, but at a moment when Ireland is literally being torn asunder by a rogue, ostensibly liberal-progressive government, it seems weak and even disingenuous to claim artistic licence for a book that was bound to be used as a smugscreen by unprincipled public actors. In a time of war, avoidance by an artist becomes a form of aggression, because it allows evil to be done without its being named by those whose job it is to protect the conscience and liberty of their race — and here we deal not simply with avoidance but an act of artistic misdirection that clearly falls in with the wishes and ambitions of those seeking to destroy our cultures and imprison our children. This ‘prophet song’ is sung not for truth but for the approval of a sick culture, a corrupt establishment and an artistic community that has bought into probably the biggest lie in the history of mendacity. Its ‘success’, however pecuniarily rewarding, will therefore curdle in the future artistic pantheon of humanity, as time passes and truth reasserts its fragrant claims.

Perhaps the most immediate path to redemption for this book, conferring upon it at least some outward semblance of moral veracity, would be to change its title to Profit Song.

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