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Prophet Song by Paul Lynch [2023]
Utopian and Dystopian novels have been with us for a long time. The Utopian novel portrays imaginary communities that have desirable or near perfect qualities; the Dystopian novel portrays societies that are bad and frightening. Utopia was written by Thomas More in 1516. In my youth I relished reading 20th century dystopian novels: Brave New World [1932] by Aldous Huxley, 1984 [1948] by George Orwell, Earth Abides [1949] by George Stewart come to mind. I found them fascinating. They speculated on a darker future, totalitarian governments, brain-washing, and adjustments to a world devastated by plagues.
I went back to school in the mid-80s and read More’s Utopia. I found it inspiring, suggesting a different way of organizing societies; I found the original Utopia fascinating because it was written at the time the “New World” was being “discovered,” the world of Indoamerica. This was a field that seemed rich with possibilities that western empires seemed to dismiss, disdain, and dismantle, a field that would become the focus of my undergraduate and graduate studies.
More recently, I have read other dystopian novels: Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower [1993], Cormac McCarthy’s The Road [2005], many of the novels of Roberto Bolaño, and this month Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. Prophet Song, a gripping read, was awarded this year’s Booker Prize. It takes place in an Ireland of the near future, an Ireland taken over by a fascist government that has declared martial law and ruthlessly detains and murders dissidents. The book focuses on three generations of a family and the impact the dictatorship has on them. The book is well written, by turns poetic, empathetic and manages to evoke the thoughts of Eilish, daughter of Simon, wife of Larry, and mother of five children as they resist, are detained, and ultimately are put to flight. At times, in its imagery and in Eilish’s thought, Lynch evokes Sarajevo, Gaza, the swelling immigrant waves from North Africa in the Mediterranean world and Central and South America on our own southern borders.
So why are we - or at least some of us - drawn to literary evocations of Dystopias? And why are the recent, post-Octavia Butler dystopic renderings more disturbing than Huxley and Orwell and Stewart. I would hazard an answer to the first question; literature is able to portray the immediacy and empathy within hard times. To the second question, the earlier works seemed to be ameliorated after the defeat of fascism and the decay of authoritarianisms and ergo we as humans, however tenuously, prevailed. To the third question, it seems that the world we live in is more fragile and evidently unstable than in previous times. Climate, rising of blind, kleptocratic nationalisms, huge immigrant waves, are described in a world of our nightmares not our dreams. There are truths with which we need to grapple in order to survive. And Lynch’s rendering of a single family’s experiences, the micro rather than the macro, provides room for hope. An aspiration we desperately need.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ckNSCeHyfY
By Louis Segal. Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015. Retired but not withdrawn.
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