Why everyone must read ‘Prophet Song’

This is not a book review, but rather a piece of writing on why Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker Prize-winning novel Prophet Song deserves serious attention and reading. The novel is distressing, powerful, and universally relevant, and it is a timely warning for all. It is a work of fiction, but didn’t the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus say, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth?”

We live in a world fraught with conflicts and chaos—Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sudan, and Somalia—rife with civil wars, killings, people fleeing, pain, grief, and uncertainty coupled with authoritarianism. This Orwellian nightmare comes alive in Paul Lynch’s 300-page dystopian novel, creating a terrifying depiction of the author’s own country, Ireland, descending into totalitarianism.

The award-winning Irish writer effectively brings home the plight of those suffering elsewhere right into Dublin, giving everyone a reality check of what it means to live in a world of civil strife, authoritarian tyranny, and uncertainty. The November riots and violent protests in Dublin, followed by shock and disbelief, make the novel all the more topical and appealing. 

For the uninitiated, the story revolves around the Stack family, who are leading a normal, happy life in Dublin. But a knock on the door one night by two secret police agents turns life upside down. They come after Larry, a teacher and general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, who believes in truth and justice, but the authorities think otherwise. He is detained under the emergency powers of the new right-wing government. Larry becomes unreachable, and the family has to find a way out of “that darkness.”

If it sounds scary, it also sounds familiar. The author has crafted a superb, if disturbing, story that echoes the happenings in some countries, the experiences of people fleeing conflicts, and the studied indifference of the rest of the world. Evidently, the author’s aim is to evoke empathy for the sufferings of millions of people; the story serves as a wake-up call that such a nightmarish state can be anywhere, today or tomorrow.

In an interview on the Booker Prize website, the author candidly stated: “I was aware while writing this book that I was addressing in part a modern problem: why are we in the West so short on empathy for the refugees flooding towards our borders? Prophet Song is partly an attempt at radical empathy. To understand better, we must first experience the problem for ourselves. And so, I sought to deepen the dystopian by bringing to it a high degree of realism.”

Echoing similar sentiments, Esi Edugyan, a novelist and chair of this year’s Booker judging panel, said: “Prophet Song resonated with contemporary crises, including the Israel-Hamas war, but that the novel had won solely on its literary merits. It captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment. Readers will find it soul-shattering and true, and they will not soon forget its warnings.”

The story is not just about violence, heartache, cracking down on protests and breaking trade unions, tyranny, and persecution, but equally about the experience of fleeing from your home country to an unknown existence as refugees. Thus, it also strikes at the core of the stark and inhuman response of the leaders of many countries to the refugee crisis.

There are some other happenings in the novel that have resonances in various parts of the world: conspiracies, the State coming down on the opposition and those it perceives as “traitors,” people suddenly going missing, arrests, lies that are accepted as truths, and the growing number of supporters of the fascist regime.

To reiterate, Prophet Song should serve as a social document of our time and a wake-up call to all. It is profound and riveting, something that everyone needs to read and experience, including our leaders and policymakers, so as to be sensitised to the realities happening in different parts of the world.

It is no coincidence that for the second successive year, a haunting, political novel has won the prestigious Booker Prize. In 2022, Shehan Karunatilaka won the award for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a novel that chronicled the civil strife of Sri Lanka. It shouldn’t come as a surprise if the 2024 Booker Prize also goes to a work centred around a strife-torn or political theme. All these may be works of fiction, but fiction enables us to gain perspective, to see truths, and leads us to empathy as well as literacy, to comprehend, understand nuance, and make us realise the truth. In fact, recent research in neuroscience suggests that fiction helps people develop empathy, a theory of mind, and critical thinking.

(The writer is a senior journalist)