‘The universal trickster has been at work on my life in all sorts of wild ways,” Irish novelist Paul Lynch tells me the morning after he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, which imagines Ireland taken over by a fascist regime. It has been a dramatic few years since he started writing the novel in 2018: his son had just been born; he had long Covid, which made writing an impossibility some days; he has had cancer and separated from his wife. And now he has landed the biggest prize in contemporary fiction. “There’s a general sense of unreality,” he says of winning. “I’ve stepped into my own ‘Sliding Doors’ counterfactual narrative.”
Before beginning the novel, Lynch had spent months writing “the wrong book”. Then, one Friday afternoon, he realised it was dead. The following Monday he sat in his shed at the bottom of his garden in Dublin, opened a new Word document and the first page of Prophet Song came to him almost as it appears in the novel. He describes it as “one of the miracles” of his writing life. “The entire meaning of what was to come in the book is encoded in those first few lines and yet I didn’t know what I was going to write.”
That opening page begins with a knock on the door on a suburban Dublin street. Two members of the newly formed Irish secret police are looking for Eilish Stack’s husband, Larry, a leader of the teaching trade union. From that first line to the devastating final pages, we are dragged into Eilish’s world as first her husband and then her eldest son are “disappeared”. Creeping surveillance, the erosion of civil liberties, curfews and censorship grow into all-out civil war. Democracies crumble gradually – then suddenly, to quote Hemingway.
Lynch has called the novel an “experiment in radical empathy” – and it is impossible to read the scenes of a city under siege, shelling and walls plastered with photographs of missing loved ones, without thinking of the conflict zones in the world right now. Not to mention the refugee crisis and the rise of the far right. Just last week, Dublin was shocked by anti-immigration riots. “To see this now is a wake-up call,” says Lynch. “The far right is here. It’s small, but it’s here.”
Back in 2018, though, the situation in Syria was very much on Lynch’s mind – in particular the tragedy of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler found washed up on a Turkish beach. “The question I asked myself was, ‘Why don’t I feel this more than I should?’ I started to think about how I’m desensitised by the news. Even now, watching TV, we’re starting to switch off from the Middle East in the same way we switched off from Ukraine. It’s inevitable. If we were to truly take on the enormity of the world and its horrors, we would not be able to get out of bed in the morning.”
He chafes at the label “political novelist”, although he realises it will be hard to shake off now. He resists comparisons between Prophet Song and dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “Too often writers of political fiction believe they have the answers, they know what it is that needs to be fixed.” He is more interested in asking questions. “This is fundamentally about grief. It’s about the things that we cannot control, the things that are beyond our grasp, the things that are lost.” For him the novel’s forebears are Don DeLillo’s Mao II or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The latter writer’s influence seeps through his pages darker than ink.
Lynch, now 46, writes “state-of-the-soul novels”, he says. “Art isn’t a rational process. You don’t sit down and go, ‘I’m going to address this.’” He wanted to make the reader feel what it must be like to be so desperate you contemplate taking your children on a small boat with strangers in the middle of the night. “It’s about not averting your gaze,” he says. “Locking the reader into a true sense of inevitability so they cannot turn away. So they cannot say, ‘I don’t want to look at this.’”
He succeeds. Written in long, poetically charged sentences – unfettered by paragraph breaks or speech marks – the book plunges the reader into a 300-page nightmare. “There’s no room to breathe,” he says. “There’s no escape. Events are pulling you and so the paragraphs are not there, and they’re not there because there should not be white space. Because Eilish has no room to breathe, the reader should have no room to breathe either.”
Lynch talks as he writes. His book is set in a near-future or counterfactual Ireland, but there is no mention of Irish history or party politics – a vagueness that has bothered some critics. This lack of specificity gives the novel a mythic, timeless quality. Lynch took The Iliad and “turned it inside out”, removing all the heroics and politics. “You’re left with the people in the background who are dealing with the mess.” As a story of one woman’s heroic attempts to hold her family together, the novel makes politics obsessively personal. There may be a state of emergency but babies begin to teethe, children’s feet continue to grow and siblings squabble over the remote control. “I go around Lidl and Aldi with a trolley, that’s my life,” Lynch says. “Let’s get down to the gritty reality – because that’s what makes this book real.”
He also wanted to show that the idea of the end of world reoccurs throughout history. “This idea of the armageddon is actually a fantasy; the idea that the world is going to end in some sudden event in your lifetime. But the world is always ending over and over again. It comes to your town, and it knocks on your door.”
It knocked on Lynch’s door not long after he delivered the manuscript for Prophet Song. He was 45 and felt he was writing at the top of his game, and then he was diagnosed with a tumour on his kidney. “When you sit in the chair,” he says, “and you’re told you’ve got cancer, that thing you carry around with you all your life, that invincibility shield, it’s just shattered into a million pieces. You become vulnerable in a way that’s almost inconceivable to your previous self.” The idea that he would not be around for his two children was unconscionable. After an operation – “I donated a kidney to the hospital incinerator” – and immunotherapy, doctors have told him the likelihood of it returning is very low. “I’m taking them at their word. I’m just moving straight forward.”
A year later, on the same day he was on the operating table, he discovered he was on the Booker shortlist. During this time his marriage ended. “I’ve had so many changes in my life, I’m sort of finding out again who I am now. I have all these layers of my day-to-day personality being recreated.”
The middle of three children, Lynch was born in Limerick, in the south-west, but the family moved to Donegal and his childhood was spent in remote Malin Head. “The world is stripped bare up there. I can still hear the wind. I still have within me the feeling of the sky up there. That’s imprinted on my psyche. It’s very elemental. And my writing is elemental.” He recalls walking to the car to go to school one day and the wind lifting him off his feet. He banged his head and suffered a mild concussion. “And that’s what’s just happened to me now,” he says of winning the Booker.
He called his parents at 1am to tell them the news. “It’s a fairytale as far as they’re concerned. They know what a few years I’ve had.” His mother was an adult literacy teacher: she taught him to read when he was four using flash cards from a cereal box, like Eilish in the novel. “My mother got me a job in a secondhand bookshop when I was 11, because they couldn’t keep me in books,” he recalls. “She’s a huge presence for me in terms of shaping who I am now.”
Nearly all of Lynch’s previous four novels – Red Sky in Morning (2013), The Black Snow (2014), Grace (2017), Beyond the Sea (2019) – deal with Irish history and all of his characters suffer, but none is as bleak as Prophet Song. “I’m a writer who belongs to a tragic worldview,” he concedes cheerfully. The final line of the novel came to him early, and he wrote towards that point. Was there a moment where he thought he might give Eilish a happy ending? Is there hope? “I think that’s a shocking question,” he admonishes me, amicably. “Do you think it’s important? Do you think it’s my job to solve and offer solace to the reader? I don’t think about endings as happy or sad, I think about being truthful. If you cheat the reader of truth they will turn away from you.”
Nevertheless, he put off writing those final, harrowing chapters for months – until one night he had a dream and woke up and realised he knew how to do it. He got in the car and drove to a remote countryside cottage to escape from being at home with two small children. It was during the pandemic and, in a case of life imitating art, he had to break the Irish curfews to do so. As he was driving, he was thinking of excuses he would make if he was caught, just like Eilish in the novel. “I thought this is getting very weird.” Usually a very slow, meticulous writer - “200 words a day for me is marvellous” – he wrote 9,000 words in five days. “It was just built up inside me, months and months and months of the damn thing.”
All his novels are about “the dignity of human beings faced with an indifferent and alien world”, he says. “Life is suffering and yet it’s beautiful. And there’s so much that falls between those two places. I’m never going to get bored of that.”
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld Publications, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
