Prophet Song
In one of his novels, Light in August I think, William Faulkner spoke of people who are so deeply rooted to their surroundings they become trees, anchored to the soil that one day admits them. This notion of rootedness, implacability has an important presence in Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, where events within the milieu take a turn so dark, so incrementally repressive and threatening that its protagonist enters a kind of paralysis, suspended somewhere on the axis between fight or flight, in part because her naïveté has nurtured a sense of denial, but also because she is rooted, a tree, a creature of habit and familiarity now confronted by a world shockingly transformed, where any notion of personal rights and freedoms have been repressed, movement restricted, where the air is charged with menace, surveillance, subterfuge, confusion, where the presence of death is strong.
Lynch did well to position his protagonist in such a context. As the pressure from the ill-defined authoritarian government ratchets up- at first in the sense of intimidating silence, stonewalling, and obsfucation, then later a military presence of bombs exploding, gunfire, choppers circling, power outages, the protagonist, Eilish, is slowly compressed, her thinking shrink-wrapped, a mother unable to get answers to her husband’s disappearance, her child’s disappearance, her scramble for food and medicine, barriers to move about the city and attend to her father amidst a series of intimidating checkpoints, sniper fire, civil war. The mother puts on a brave front to her children, naively providing the false reassurances that everything will turn out ok in the end.
Much has been made of the plausibility of such a state of affairs, in Ireland of all places, where the potential of a right wing authoritarian crackdown likely does seem far fetched, but perhaps the real plausibility test here is grounded in historical antecedent. It was Margaret Atwood who made the point that in both the writing and filming of The Handmaid’s Tale nothing would be present or permitted that had not already happened in history. She insisted upon it. Many of Lynch’s events, I think, have plausible historical precedent, though it might be noted that left wing repressive governments- not just just right wing- have also been guilty of the terrors and deprivations found in Prophet Song, as anyone familiar with the French and Russian revolutions will know.
Lynch does a good job standing a mother up against this face of evil, seizing our attention as the harrowing events unfold in personal terms, as relatable trauma, the plight of a single family under totalitarian extremes. Lynch also does arguably well to work within the defined boundary of a single state, much like Jose Saramago did in his novel Blindness. In both cases the vaguely defined boundaried state is used to make a broader, more universal observation. Saramago wanted us to see that our sight is the only thing that keeps us civilized. Lynch offers two conclusions:
1) “ the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that 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”
“2). “History is a silent record of people who could not leave”
The first of these is the novel’s best idea, the second is conditionally the worst, conditionally because it can be modified fairly easily to read: history in some instances is a silent record of people who could not leave, or bring themselves to leave. The irony of Lynch’s second idea here is clear-that an Irish author is speaking of history being about people who couldn’t leave, when millions of Irish did in fact leave during the potato famine down through the 20th century. For someone who portends to have an eye on universal themes, as Lynch certainly does, this is not lost on us, nor should it be, though examples of his point can be retrieved.