Prophet Song: "the end of the world is always a local event.."

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, is  billed in some quarters as a cautionary tale about what happens when a  country allows itself to be taken over by authoritarians.  It begins on a cold and rainy night when government agents come for Larry, a union leader and the husband of Eilish through whose eyes we see the drama.  From there things go from bad to worse.

But the book is far from being just another dystopic tale, ready to send shivers up the reader's spine but soon to be forgotten.  It is told with curious mixture of concrete detail--what you need when you're preparing for a siege, why the water from the kitchen faucet runs brown, the rapidity with which people put up or take down flags that are symbols of their allegiance--and poetic description.  It is written in lengthy  run-on sentences that both sweep the reader along, and make him or her gasp for breath at the audacity of seeing inside someone's head so clearly. The combination is mesmerizing.  

Lynch says he was  compelled to write Prophet Song by the Syria refugee crisis of 2015 and subsequent years.  Since he did not know enough about Syria he transposed his drama about people responding to civil war and an authoritarian state from there to Ireland, where he was born and where he still lives.  That he can make the transfer so believable is evidence of his skill as a storyteller but also sad testimony to how close to the surface disaster is in most places.

Ultimately, however, Lynch offers a sort of hope. He writes of Eilish as she tries to escape with her two surviving children. 

"... she looks at her infant son... and she can see that the world does not end, that it is a vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time...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..."

At the time I first read those words I was working on my book about the importance of collective and individual memory to the survival of our civilizations, Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years.   Yes, I thought, the end may seem nigh, but we must continue as best we can.  Which is what Eilish does in the end, the very end.

A book to read and to think about.