What if war came to you?
Reading Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, Or how to start the year cheerfully.
What if ordinary, middle-class life in a democracy was suddenly interrupted by war. How would an unremarkable family confront the darkness, make fatal choices around survival? This is the premise of the 2023 Booker Prize-winning novel by Paul Lynch, Prophet Song. It’s a must-read.
The Moloch in Lynch’s novel is a civil war unleashed by a fascist government that has seized power in a fictional but deeply recognisable Ireland and proceeds to enact emergency legislation and set its security police on all opposition. The move is backed by segments of a population tuned to Orwell’s trick of endless propaganda about threats and enemies, external and internal.
Prophet Song is both unsettlingly lyrical in conveying the emotions and perceptions of its chief characters, and powerfully plot driven. In fact, it can be hard to give reading space to the lyricism as the plot unspools, but worth it (or so I found on a second reading, having originally given myself full-over to the plot).
The main character in the novel is a mother, Eilish Stack, who finds her family ripped away from her by the brutality of repression and war. Her husband, a trade unionist, is ‘disappeared’ by the Irish security police. Her eldest teenager cannot bear the loss of his father and joins the rebel forces, moving out of all knowledge of his mother. Another teenage boy is wounded in a barrel bomb attack on their suburban Dublin street, is spirited away to a military hospital, tortured and killed. When the anguished mother finally tracks him down it is to identify his body in a make-shift morgue.
Eilish is left with a baby and one girl, the remnants of her family, with a guttering hope, and driven onto the migrants’ brutal path as she ultimately decides to abandon her home and escape the war. The final pages are replete with shady people smugglers, bribery and corruption, and the loss of any ability to control her own fortunes. The novel ends on a beach with Eilish, the baby and her surviving daughter being hustled into two inflatables, facing an ocean “dark and barren.” It has the feel of the Odyssey and monsters awaiting. It is both mythological and front-page news.
This is a horrifying novel for our horrifying times. It is woven with reminders of the siege of Sarajevo, the Syrian civil war, the ISIS onslaught, the Russian assault on Ukraine. Written before the Hamas attack on Israel it is also a novel that sings of the suffering of Israeli and Gazan civilians.
The novel is finally a reminder of the potential frailty of a democracy taken too much for granted by its own citizens. This is where the story of the Prophet Song begins.
It remains the case that democracies are most easily overthrown at the ballot box, and once that happens bad things can begin, especially when security threats become the engine to bend reality, facilitated by the technological capacities of disinformation and the impoverishment of popular knowledge. Lynch, it is fair to say, has a dark view of the masses, again perhaps a borrowing from Orwell.
As commentators have pointed out, 2024 will be the year of all years for elections globally. The count is staggering—more than 60 countries and roughly half the world’s population will cast votes in various elections.
See the survey in Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/01/what-to-watch-global-elections-2024-00133027
Some will be forgone conclusions—think Vladimir Putin in Russia. Others may shape the future—from Taiwan to South Africa to Mexico and on to the biggee--the United States itself. South Asia will see important contests in India and Pakistan, which will shape Canada’s own engagement in the region.
All eyes may be on the US Presidential elections but all eyes should be on the fate of democracies worldwide. Every election will feature messages about national security and how to achieve it. Corralling those messages within the spirit of a genuine democratic discourse is a growing challenge as democracy faces off against authoritarianism and right-wing populism.
It can’t happen here, can it?
No Prophet Song for Canada, please.
Wow! Just wow!
A terrifically powerful essay, Sir.
Your penultimate paragraph sentence is a somewhat despairing, "It can't happen here, can it?" And, despairing it should be.
Many people in this country are looking at the US and at the possibility of Trump winning election. I think that is an interesting question / phenomenon / situation / call it what you will. But, I live in Canada and cannot in any way affect or influence the US future.
Unhappily, I increasingly feel that I cannot affect or influence the Canadian future. For the first time in my 70 odd years I declined to vote in the last federal election. Actually, I doggoned well refused to vote. The reason was that I perceived that all the major parties [I ignore the People's Party as not being "major."] were running on platforms that in varying ways were targeting my province of Alberta for dreadful things. I knew that the ultimate "winner" [oxymoron, no?] of that election would proclaim, "The people have spoken!" and I was damned if I would participate in a way that was so odious as to "celebrate" any platform that was so anti-Alberta.
I am uncertain if I will vote in the next election - I suspect that I will, but I will have to see - but I absolutely do see that "It can happen here!" I am not one of the conspiracy nuts who see the WEF running things, blah, blah, blah, but I absolutely do see that PM Blackface has so indoctrinated his core group with the Green Religion and the "knowledge" that budgets balance themselves and the certainty that one can borrow oneself to prosperity (until bankruptcy intervenes, that is), policies that are oriented to impoverishing this country so badly that it could indeed happen here.
Again, I don't have much thought about the US; I worry about this country.
I remember seeing the news about the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and around the same time the Quebec referendum. And ranting at people, “It CAN happen here--because we’re the same human flesh, with the same needs and desires as everyone else on the planet.”