Culture Reviews - Prophet Song, our 1984

Recently, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song was highly, not to say forcefully, recommended to me both as an extraordinary work of fiction and as the 21st century’s successor to George Orwell’s 1984. My first reaction was that its premise—a mother’s dilemmas in an authoritarian state—was too obviously grabbed from the headlines. Yes, if you count all the headlines of the last decade—think just of Syria, Gaza, and Yemen. (The book was published in 2023 and won the Booker Prize that year.) But, no, once you recognize that none of what its protagonist Eilish Stack experiences has ever been the stuff of headlines. 

Paul Lynch’s dystopia is personal, not social.  Unlike George Orwell’s 1984, which shows the mechanisms of mind control, Lynch’s Prophet Song immerses us in the subjective terror of living in a state of exception invoked by a government’s imposition of “Emergency Powers.” Instead of situating the crisis within a fictitious super-state as Orwell does, Lynch rejects allegory for the recognizable streets and houses of Dublin, where Eilish lives with her four children and her husband, Larry, the story’s fulcrum.

Larry, arrested for leading a teachers’ union protest, effectively disappears. His extra-legal banishment gives Eilish both reason to stay—he might walk in the door any day and what if they weren’t there—and reason to leave, as she slowly realizes that his absence is part of a more pervasive and threatening pattern which will subsume what’s left of her life. First, there are inconveniences: the water in their faucets turns brown, but then there are the intrusions into her psyche. Eilish becomes invisible when her butcher ignores her while serving other customers. A wedding becomes an occasion for party fealty, effectively excommunicating her from her larger family of aunts and cousins. However, it would be missing the point to read the book as a litany of slights and insults.

Prophet Song is less a portrait of the workings of tyranny than it is a portrait of what being tyrannized feels like, smells like, looks like, sounds like, even tastes like. Looking for a paint scraper to remove the graffiti that has vandalized her house, Eilish “meets instead her humiliation as though it were on the shelf before her, the shame and pain and grief moving freely through her body.” Even more recognizable is the confusion of how to think and act under such conditions. Eilish drifts between feeling she has agency—that hope and survival remain possible—and feeling disoriented and powerless. Desperate for signs of continuity with the world as she knew it, Eilish observes that “trees keep counting the time by ringing the time in their wood.” And later, that there is “memory in the weather.” These things cannot be defeated. The disjuncture between the events that threaten to overwhelm her and the constancy of nature is not entirely unfamiliar, albeit in less fraught circumstances. It’s like having a bad flu and looking out the window at people going about their business on a sunny day, and being vaguely (and absurdly) astonished that life is moving on without you. 

Eilish’s circumstances are beyond fraught.  She is subject to relentless intrusions without defenses, only children who need defending. A professional woman, a scientist, she is not prone to paranoia and keeps a strong maternal front. She continues to send the children to school, stubbornly maintaining the importance of soon-to-be-obsolete rites of passage like playing hockey and getting into university. When her daughter Molly accuses her of doing nothing to get Larry back, Eilish says, “Sometimes not doing something is the best way to get what you want.” Yet, she does wear the white scarf that marks her as a dissident—and gets her fired. In her vacillations, Lynch captures that uncanny state of being simultaneously aware and in disbelief when reality is no longer solid. 

So, while Orwell has enjoyed a justly deserved revival since the first Trump presidency, Lynch’s is the book for this moment. His story operates with an immediacy that would have been foreign to readers in 1949, when Orwell’s book was published. Those readers would have recognized the allusions to Stalin’s regime and its bureaucracy of cruelty but they would have the distance of observers, of readers. Since Orwell set it thirty-five years in the future, 1984 would have been read as ‘not yet, perhaps never.’ That luxury is stripped away in the claustrophobic pages of Prophet Song. Its events happen in real time and from innocuous beginnings—a party wins an election. Lynch’s prose doesn’t leave any space to catch your breath. There are almost no paragraph breaks and sentences grow like panic, as when Eilish runs into Rory, an old acquaintance.

He is quick to speak about old times and she watches his face hurrying him along with her eyes, a bus pulls away expelling hot diesel smoke and Rory steps back, his scarf stirring to reveal the party pin on the lapel of his jacket. She takes a step backwards, swallows and closes her eyes, Rory smiling with his teeth.

This is an early hint of ostracization that will ultimately turn violent. When vigilantes turn from neighborly scorn to lethal force, Eilish’s oldest son joins the rebels to fight the government. (He won’t be seen again.) Soon after, her twelve-year-old son is abducted from his school. After an agonizing search, she finds him in a state morgue bearing unmistakable marks of torture and murder. Utterly devastated, she has no time to mourn. She’s still caring for her father, daughter, and toddler amidst accelerating assaults.  

In setting Prophet Song in the Republic of Ireland (instead of Northern Ireland, where the violence of the Troubles is within living memory), Lynch makes real the truth that a domestic Armageddon can happen anywhere and at any time.  As he remarked in a PBS Interview, “the civilized world is a thin veneer, so fragile and easily lost.”  He claims, however, not to be writing a polemic of grievance—as tempting as it is to think he’s holding up a mirror to any number of authoritarian governments. Instead, he calls Prophet Song a story of grief. It is a story about the pain that follows when society segregates those it deems normal from those it condemns and terrorizes as abnormal.

Terror isn’t an abstraction when you’re tensed for the next assault, when it infiltrates the lives of your family and your colleagues. Just ask around. It’s hard to find someone unaffected, if only indirectly. In fact, it is the indirect affects that are the most insidious, spurring pre-emptive censorship and equivocations between compliance with and rejection of the new status quo. This is a tightrope act that Eilish ultimately refuses to perform.

Lynch’s novel does more than prophesize a tragedy brought on by authoritarian muzzle and muscle. It rehearses its execution. Its characters are as recognizable as our own kith and kin, as recognizable as us. This is its potency. Prophet Song makes terror intimate. 

Bio

Susan Yelavich is Professor Emerita, Design Studies, Parsons School of Design, The New School. A Fellow of the American Academy of Rome (2004) and the Bogliasco Foundation (2018), she is a member of Scientific Committee for Design at Politecnico di Milano and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw’s FAIR Design conferences. Her contributions to design scholarship span over four decades, including 15 years at Parsons and 25 years at Cooper Hewitt Museum. She is the author of Thinking Design through Literature (2019), Design as Future-Making (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Contemporary World Interiors (Phaidon, 2007). Her writing is archived at www.susanyelavich.com