Criticism Without Critique: a Review of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song

Prophet Song is the fifth novel of award-winning Irish author Paul Lynch. Published in 2023, it quickly became his bestselling and best-received book, winning him the Booker prize in the same year. The novel concerns itself with the rise of a fascist government in Ireland, and the repercussions of its rule on the lives of a middle-class Dublin family. Eilish is the point of view character for the entire book, and it’s through her eyes that we watch her world, and Irish society more generally, crumble around her. While the novel successfully captures the sense of a world amid major upheaval and collapse, it suffers from a lack of clarity in explaining why these events occur, which, as I will show, results in a somewhat unbelievable and grey setting.

Eilish, we are told, is married to a senior union organiser by the name of Larry. We are parachuted into the days before a planned national teachers’ strike and march, in an Ireland that has become increasingly authoritarian. The National Alliance Party (NAP), which came to power two years before this in a landslide election, has established a new secret police force, and has assumedly taken a harder stance against unions and attempts by workers to organise collectively. Larry is initially reluctant to go ahead with the planned strike, but Eilish drives him on, giving him the boost he needs to continue his work. The action proceeds as planned, but is brutally repressed by the State. Larry and many others are arrested and held without charge. From here, events slowly begin to escalate.

Lynch maintains a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere throughout the novel. He uses frequent run-on sentences and avoids separating dialogue and Eilish’s thoughts from the rest of the text with paragraph breaks, which adds to an overall feeling of rushed confusion. This very much matches the story, as after the arrests of the strikers and their leaders, societal tension builds. A protest movement, lamenting the disappearances of those arrested, springs up, using the colour white as a symbol of their dissent.

Initially, Eilish refuses to come to terms with her husband’s disappearance (and implied murder). Still, she begins to slowly open her eyes and chooses to attend one of these anti-government protests with her children. While this is happening, Mark, her eldest son, is becoming increasingly withdrawn, and it is implied that anti-NAP activists are radicalising him.  This comes to a head when he’s called up for national service. Eilish hides him, but he soon disappears to join the rebel forces forming elsewhere in the country.

All-out war very quickly arrives at Eilish’s doorstep, with the Irish State now in conflict with a rebel military force. The rebels overrun Dublin, but not before Eilish’s house is destroyed in a rocket barrage.  Her second son, Bailey survives, but is later kidnapped by State forces and tortured to death. All this time, Eilish’s sister had been attempting to get Eilish and her family out of the State, having successfully evacuated their father, but Eilish, in some vain hope that her husband and son might return, refused to comply. However, now wracked with grief and faced with the consequences of her lack of action, she chooses to flee with her daughter and youngest son. The last scene in the book sees the main character and her remaining family board dinghies to flee the island. 

From the outset, it is very clear that Lynch is making overtures to the Syrian Civil War. From the young kids who are disappeared by the State after the anti-government protests are repressed, which seems to spark the civil war, to the civil defence volunteers who help Eilish out when a rocket barrage hits her street, noted to be wearing white helmets, it borders on being a bit on the nose. Nonetheless, this all makes sense considering Lynch’s stated intention with the novel: to help humanise refugees by bringing the reality of war and population displacement to our doors. To this end, he succeeds. While reading the book (and I must say I was engrossed from beginning to end), I couldn’t help but think about the real-life refugees that I work with, live near and see on the streets day in and day out, and wonder what similarities their stories share with fictional Eilish. In an increasingly anti-migrant Ireland, this is much needed. 

However, the book stumbles when it tries to (either consciously or subconsciously) address other matters. We get no explanation or even a hint of an explanation for why the NAP came to power in the first place. Some characters mention ‘national crises’ and general difficulties facing the nation, but it is all extremely vague, as if Lynch does not want to tackle the realities of how these kinds of regimes come to power and what that could say about a country and a people. Lynch has noted elsewhere that while some might label his novel as political, he is sceptical of it, and so one could say that he had no intention of tackling these questions; he simply needed a background against which to frame his story about a family falling apart and becoming refugees.¹ This just doesn’t ring true to me, and would be contradicted by Lynch himself in the same interview, where he states that an intention with this book was to address how the default that many assume liberal democracy to be, is not in fact a default, but just one mode of society, which can quickly fall away; an incredibly political point!² But to make this point land, you do have to address how and why this can happen, neither of which Lynch does to any great degree. His novel seems to treat the action of the book, the rise of the NAP, the protests and the civil war as simple forces of nature; things that happen because they happen, not as a result of other subjective factors both in Irish society and the world. 

As other reviews have noted, this is the result of a very liberal and apolitical understanding of fascism, and politics more generally.³ An attitude that the novel shares with Civil War, a 2024 movie directed by Alex Garland. Both this novel and the Civil War attempt to engage in a critique of their respective nations through their story and their setting, but refuse to ground the story or the setting in the actual reality of either country. Civil War claims to be a movie about war photography (and even if this were true, it would be a bad one), but if that were its genuine sole point of focus, why set the story in the United States in the middle of a modern civil war? 

Both Civil War and Prophet Song want the added weight of an implied profound critique of their respective societies and political scenes, without the political reality and need to actually say something substantive that any good critique would entail. This is a disappointing omission, partly because it was a key element that kept me engrossed, but also because it is possible to make such critiques without disrupting the story’s flow. Prophet song, as part of the dystopian novel genre, finds itself alongside titles like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. While it may seem somewhat unfair to compare this book to these household names, it becomes necessary when we want to see how such critiques can be done correctly. The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, tackles the political reality of evangelical Christianity in America and the dangers it presented (and still presents) in American society. Atwood did not shy away from addressing how a society such as Gilead could come about, who it would be for, and why. Lynch and Garland simply hope you won’t wonder these things about their settings, I would assume, because they themselves don’t know!

In the end, while the emotional story of how a family slowly disintegrates as society collapses around them is very compelling, and makes this book worth the time I put into reading it, it exists against a backdrop that will draw you in with its intrigue, and the fact that it will be close to home for many of us, only to leave you disappointed when it remains the same gray undefined painted board it started as. By being unable or unwilling to give some real political grounding to the world and story of this novel, one is simply left confused when the last pages arrive. I was disappointed to see the back of this book, as I usually am when a novel takes over my life for a few weeks, but not for the usual reasons. I felt cheated out of an explanation in a way that didn’t add to the story’s themes and emotion. I can only hope that the next dystopian hit (and given the political climate right now, who wouldn’t jump on the boat) will actually try to say something more substantial about our fracturing world and not hide away from ‘naming the names’. 

1. Charles, Ron “Paul Lynch — Prophet Song – with Ron Charles”, Politics and Prose, (2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch2}?v=dAGPOX7DoTE ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Connolly Youth Movement “Prophet Song: A liberal analysis of fascism”, Forward, (2024), https://cym.ie/prophet-song-a-liberal-analysis-of-fascism/ ↩︎