The second section of the third chapter of Prophet Song is long, what with the lack of paragraphing. I count 872 words.
She is distracted at work, pacing within, seeing before her some shadowed obstacle and seeking a path around it, saying to herself over and over, they will not take my son. There are rumours in the company of a blood-letting, of a phased wind-down, none of it can be true. They are called into the meeting room where it is announced the managing director Stephen Stoker has been stood down, he did not come into work this morning, they are told that Paul Felsner will replace him. He comes before them pulling on the tips of his fingers with a small hand and cannot hide his delight. She watches about the room as he speaks selecting for his supporters by the clapping hands and smiles, seeing the wild animal among them, seeing how it has done away with concealment and pretence, how it prowls now in the open as Paul Felsner raises his hand in hieratic gestures speaking not the company speak but the cant of the party, about an age of change and reformation, an evolution of the national spirit, of dominion leading into expansion, a woman walks across the room and opens a window. Eilish finds herself stepping out of the lift onto the ground floor. She crosses the street and goes into the newsagent’s, points to a pack of cigarettes. It has been a long time, she thinks, standing alone outside the office building, sliding a cigarette from the box, fondling the paper skin, running its odour under her nose. The cottony taste of cellulose acetate as she lights and pulls the hot smoke into her mouth, recalling the day she last quit, this feeling of some younger self, perhaps Larry was with her, she doesn’t know. Memory lies, it plays its own games, layers one image upon another that might be true or not true, over time the layers dissolve and become like smoke, watching the smoke that blows out her mouth vanish into the day. Watching the street as though it belongs to some other city, thinking how it is so that life seems to exist outside events, life passing by without need of witness, the congested traffic fuming in the dismal air, the people passing by harried and preoccupied, imprisoned within the delusion of the individual, this wish now she has to escape, watching until she is brought clean outside herself, the light altering tone by tone until it becomes a lucent sheen on the street, the gulls nipping at food in a gutter are dark underwing as they whip up out of the path of a lorry. Well now. Colm Perry is standing beside her tapping a cigarette on its box. I didn’t know you smoked, Eilish. She is squeezing her eyes as if to see an answer to a question she has not been asked and then she shakes her head. I can’t say that I do. Colm Perry lights a cigarette and exhales slowly. Neither do I. She pulls the dark burn inside her and wants the burn some more, studying Colm Perry’s wrinkled shirt, knowing the cerise face of a drinker, the look that rests sly in the eye of a man well in on the joke though he is laughing at them from the outside. He glances behind towards the automatic door. The gall of that man, he says, there will be a purge soon enough, they like their own kind so keep your head down, that’s all I have to say. He looks again over his shoulder and pulls out his phone. Have you seen the latest? What she sees on the phone are images of graffiti on windows and walls denouncing the gardai, the security forces and the state, triumphant scrawls in sprayed red paint. The writing looks like blood, the building looks like a school. St Joseph’s in Fairview, he says, they are saying the principal called in the GNSB who came and arrested four boys, they haven’t yet been released, it’s gone on a few days but the story’s only online now, there are parents and students gathering outside Store Street Garda Station waiting for the boys to be freed. My son has been called up for national service, she says, he is to hand himself over the week he turns seventeen, he is still just a kid in school, and this after they take his father. Colm Perry looks at her and then he shakes his head. Bastards, he says. He cups his hand to his mouth and thinks long upon a drag then extinguishes the cigarette on the smokers’ box. You’re going to have to get him out, he says. Get him out where? She watches him shrug and open his hands and then he puts them in the pockets of his jeans. He is looking across the street to a newsagent’s. Right now, he says, I’d love an ice cream, an old-fashioned cone with a 99, I’d like to be on a beach freezing my butt off, I’d like for my parents to be still alive, look, Eilish, I don’t know, England, Canada, the USA, it’s only a sug-gestion, but you’re going to have to get him out, look, I must go back inside.
I picked this off the shelf in a California bookshop on the margins of last year’s Gallifrey One, knowing that it had won the Booker Prize but incorrectly under the impression that it was a gritty realist slice-of-Dublin-life story. I was of course wrong about this. It’s set very firmly in middle-class Dublin, but in the very near future where an extremist party wins an election and creates a police state, in turn sparking armed resistance, civil war and the collapse of society; it’s told through the viewpoint of a mother of four whose trade unionist husband disappears early in the book and who witnesses her family disintegrating.
Lynch is very clear in interviews that his intention was to bring the horrors of the Syrian conflict home to a local audience, and I think he very much succeeds. The litany of familiar Dublin place names converted into locations of violent convulsion is tremendously effective. The conversion of standard Irish official banter into the language of oppression is chilling. The worst of the violence happens off screen, but its aftermath is vividly realised. And of course it’s not just Syria; I remember Bosnia when I lived there nearly thirty years ago, which had undergone a similar implosion, and today we can look at Palestine, not only Gaza but also the West Bank, for societies being destroyed by violence.
If I had been writing a book like this, I would have also gone into the grand politics of the disaster, looking at bad and evil leadership decisions, and ineffectual international interventions which could have been done better. But Paul Lynch is not into finger-pointing; it’s simply the human experience of state violence followed by violent state collapse, and I find it all the more effective as a result. The non-paragraphed style brings an immediacy to the prose, while of course also being a salute to Joyce’s retelling of everyday Dublin life from a previous century. I am not sure if I could say I actually liked the book, but I do recommend it. You can get Prophet Song here.
I haven’t read any of the other books on the Booker Prize longlist or shortlist for 2023, but I will get to Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors very soon. Oddly enough, Prophet Song is set in the city where one of my parents was born, and The House of Doors in the city where the other was born.
This was the top unread book that I had acquired last year, and also I had thought that it was the top unread non-genre book on my shelf, but I think it is pretty clearly in the dystopian sub-genre of sf. Next on the former pile is Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle; next on the latter pile, after acquiring some of my father’s books last month, is East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.
Second paragraph of third chapter: