Suzanne Harrington: I hope this story wins The Booker Prize - it's a masterclass in empathy
Shout out to Paul Lynch, whose fifth novel Prophet Song — on the Booker shortlist — showcases an Irish dystopia set in a future so ordinary and relatable it could be happening the week after next.
Usually, when we think of an Irish dystopia, it is stuff that has already happened — a past rural theocracy with a population cowed and bullied by self-elected morality enforcers; the kind of world portrayed in the 1918 novel Valley of the Squinting Windows, or Angela’s Ashes, or the Ferns Report, or any other dystopian snapshot of the past in Ireland.
Not anymore. Unthinkable that we would ever give our power away like that again, allow ourselves to be ruled again by authoritarianism, to permit totalitarianism to cleave us apart.
Our modern country has never been freer. Young people will never know what it used to be like to live anything other than ordinary, free lives.
Shout out then to Paul Lynch, whose fifth novel Prophet Song — on the Booker shortlist — showcases an Irish dystopia set in a future so ordinary and relatable it could be happening the week after next.
An ordinary, secular Ireland like the one we have now, except falling apart economically and being ruled by an increasingly tyrannical political party called the National Assembly who have created the Garda National Service Bureau, a secret police which makes people disappear.
As if. When you begin reading, you think, yeah right, like this could ever happen here. By the end, you’re thinking, yes right, this could definitely happen anywhere, this is already happening in loads of places… what if it did happen here? To us? To me?
Because what Lynch presents is not so much an Irish totalitarian dystopia as much as a totalitarian dystopia that happens to be set in Ireland; really, it could be anywhere.
The signifiers of tyranny, the encroachment of total control, are universal. And that’s what’s so chilling — not any single dramatic event, but the steady erosion of freedom, the chipping away of it, the terrible realisation that by the time you need to get out, it’s too late. You can’t just leave.
That in order to leave, to preserve the lives of yourself and your dependents, you have to take risks and face things that you would never, in your previously dull-as-milk existence, have even realised existed, never mind contemplated.
How you end up being forced into situations and taking risks beyond your own comprehension.
I hope this wins the Booker, for reasons far beyond literary. Because when we read accounts of people fleeing horror, it’s always ‘them’ coming to ‘us’, from faraway places turned hellish.
Think journalist Mattieu Atkins’ heart-stopping real-life account of accompanying an Afghan man through the refugee underground to Europe, in The Naked Don’t Fear The Water.
In Prophet Song, we are all ‘them’; it is a masterclass in empathy, offering a bird’s eye view of the steady crushing of one’s ability to live somewhere safely, the dismantling of ordinary life by tyranny.
I hope everyone reads this, whether it wins or not — especially those who doubt the motives of people leaving unliveable places to seek safety elsewhere, as though they are somehow on the make.
The reality is that we are all potentially ‘them’ — the rest is just luck.
