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By Benjamin Markovits

Benjamin Markovits’s most recent novel, “The Sidekick,” is about the complicated friendship between a sportswriter and an N.B.A. star.

The author Paul Lynch, who won the 2023 Booker Prize for his novel “Prophet Song.” Credit...Tolga Akmen/EPA, via Shutterstock

FICTION

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“Prophet Song,” a novel by Paul Lynch, is set in Dublin during a political crisis.

A novel titled “Prophet Song” promises some degree of timeliness, and, indeed, it comes at a moment when the fear it addresses is daily in the news: that the social contract is about to break, that what we think of as ordinary life is about to be transformed into a constant existential struggle, which will be played out not in a state of nature but in something arguably worse, at the fault line between opposing ideologies. This week, the novel, by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, won the Booker Prize.

The story is set in a version of contemporary Dublin. There’s a brief reference to a pandemic early on. Molly, the protagonist’s teenage daughter, has been “disinfecting door handles, taps and toilet flushers” to stop the spread of a “virus” familiar enough to all of us that it doesn’t need to be named. But it makes no further appearance. The purpose, really, is to set the mood (apocalyptic) and a stage from which the trauma of the past few years can slide almost imperceptibly into a disaster less familiar.

Eilish, Molly’s mother, hears a knock at the door. There are two policemen outside who want to speak to her husband, Larry. “It is nothing to worry about,” one of them says, though of course Eilish starts to worry and questions her husband when he comes home. A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, as the saying goes, has appeared on their horizon.

Eilish is a biologist who works for a biotech company; Larry is the deputy general secretary of the teachers’ union. They have four children and live comfortable middle-class lives with all of the usual anxieties: battles with teenagers, fights with aging parents. But the tone from the beginning has a suppressed intensity; the novel opens with Eilish staring wistfully at garden trees. A “National Alliance Party” has recently taken control and passed an Emergency Powers Act. Larry, as a frontline trade unionist, is in the government’s sights. A big demonstration is planned. Eilish doesn’t want him to go but eventually relents. They live in a free society, after all, with a constitution and the rule of law. So he marches. What follows is a descent into chaos.

To get us there, Lynch makes a number of significant decisions. The “emergency” is never explained. Maybe it was entirely the invention of the National Alliance Party. This means that the political crisis here is a kind of blank; it has no history. There are opposing sides: the nationalists versus everyone else (eventually called “the rebels”). But we never learn what they’re arguing about, apart from the rule of law.

That the story is set in Ireland, with its long history of sectarian conflict, gives gravity even to this absence. We hear occasional church bells but no real mention of religious difference, or even unionist or anti-unionist attitudes. There is, however, a border to the north, which becomes one of the possible outlets for emigration.

To get us there, Lynch makes a number of significant decisions. The “emergency” is never explained. Maybe it was entirely the invention of the National Alliance Party. This means that the political crisis here is a kind of blank; it has no history. There are opposing sides: the nationalists versus everyone else (eventually called “the rebels”). But we never learn what they’re arguing about, apart from the rule of law.

That the story is set in Ireland, with its long history of sectarian conflict, gives gravity even to this absence. We hear occasional church bells but no real mention of religious difference, or even unionist or anti-unionist attitudes. There is, however, a border to the north, which becomes one of the possible outlets for emigration.

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