Mind Picker: Prophet Song

...it is 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, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness…

Prophet Song is a pretty tough read: I had to excerpt that opening quote because sections can run to several pages without indentations, breaks, or dialogue markers; the language is odd — with the most horrible events written about surreally, poetically and any old word acting as a verb (people “sleeve” their coats and “sudden” the room); and again, this concerns some really horrible events that are tough to read about. It takes time to get into a groove with Paul Lynch’s writing, but the effort is worth it: I suppose that confusing times call for confusing language (and I did like the language), but while I admire what the author was aiming for with this project meant to build “radical empathy” (To understand better, we must first experience the problem for ourselves.[From this interview with the Booker Prize team]), this is one of those books that I was intensely interested in while reading, but which doesn’t totally hold up the longer I think about it. I’m rounding up to four stars for the in-the-moment experience, but this is a qualified four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Mr Stack, you will be aware no doubt of the Emergency Powers Act that came into effect this September in response to the ongoing crisis facing the state, an act that gives supplemental provision and power to the GNSB for the maintenance of public order, so you must understand how this appears to us, your behaviour looks like the conduct of someone inciting hatred against the state, someone sowing discord and unrest…

It begins with an insistent knock in the night: Dubliner Eilish Stack opens the door to men from a Gardaí which has seen their powers increased with the recent election of a right-wing nationalist government. They are interested in interviewing her husband — deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (I keep seeing people refer to him as a “trade unionist”, but I think it’s important to note that he’s a teacher; this is no Jimmy Hoffa) — and while he will be incensed by this attempt to interfere with citizens’ right to democratic protest, Larry Stark’s arrest and disappearance will mark the first step in Eilish’s increasingly nightmarish experience — left to deal alone with four children and a father suffering the onset of dementia who is stubbornly remaining, by himself, in the old family home — as Ireland descends into a police state. The children fight and Eilish waits in lines for milk and batteries and the government bombs a rebel force in their neighbourhood and the repetition of details as everything gets progressively worse and worse demonstrates the banality of evil and the fragile hold any of us have on maintaining a “civil” society.

...the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true – this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.

Eilish has a sister in Canada who is trying to convince her to flee the country with the children — history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave — but Eilish can’t get her mind around leaving her life behind; can’t imagine leaving the house empty when Larry might be released (from wherever he is). And the longer this went on, and the more Eilish had to deal with roadblocks and informants and bombed-out buildings, the more I thought, “This must be the way it happened in Syria and Afghanistan and Yemen”; it must be impossible to make that choice to leave your homeland, and by the time the choice is taken out of your hands, you’re a refugee and no longer an immigrant and then who will take you in? In the moment, I got the meaning in my guts and I was moved.

Some randomish quotes:

• what does madness look like, it looks like this, not someone waving their arms and yelling at the gods but a mother trying to get back home to her children

• telling herself that what she feels isn’t grief, it has to be something else, grievance is grief dressed in the clothes of hope

• What she can see from the old bed, the window giving to sky, the open wardrobe mouthing the dark that invites the sleeping child to nightmare.

• Watching the light upon the beach, thinking, this time of light, how the days pass by gathering the light and releasing, light into night, and we reach but cannot touch nor take what passes, what seems to pass, time’s dream.

• he is smoking himself past cough into hurt.

• She keys the ignition afraid now for what lies must follow, the lies growing further out her mouth, seeing how a single lie told to a child is an outrage, that there can be no untelling it and once the lie is known it will remain outgrown from the mouth like some deadtonguing poisonous flower.

So, what gives me pause: I get that Lynch is Irish and setting this story in a stable democracy like Ireland is supposed to underline the “There but for the grace of God” narrative, but upon reflection, it felt like what he was really saying was: If this could happen to white (Irish) people, it could happen anywhere, and that felt wrong: the victims don’t have to be white for me to feel empathy. And I didn’t ultimately like this male author telling me this story from a woman’s POV — I only sometimes have a problem with that kind of authorial gender flip, but this was obviously a very deliberate decision and I had to wonder at Lynch’s intent: Would a male MC have been more decisive and taken steps to flee earlier, while Eilish was stymied and dithering by her need to mother everyone? Also: If we are to be horrified by military blockades and bombed out streets in Dublin, I found it odd that there was zero mention of this sort of thing happening before in the times of The Troubles. At one point Eilish looks at her infant son and wonders at the trauma that would poison his blood going forward, even if he never makes memories of the times they’re living through, but there is no mention of any such trauma from her own childhood tainting her own blood. Lynch gives us here the early transitional days of a police state, and with the rise of populist governments around the world, it’s fair time for a warning, but something here feels a tad exploitative and moralising. Absolutely, horrifyingly, entrancing in the moment though.

...then I awoke and began to see what they were doing to us, the brilliance of the act, they take something from you and replace it with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment and cannot live, you cease to be yourself and become a thing before this silence, a thing waiting for the silence to end, a thing on your knees begging and whispering to it all night and day, a thing waiting for what was taken to be returned and only then can you resume your life, but the silence doesn’t end, you see, they leave open the possibility that what you want will be returned some day and so you remain reduced, paralysed, dull as an old knife, and the silence does not end because the silence is the source of their power, that is its secret meaning.

Lovely, lovely sentences throughout.