“What I see now, Eilish, is a black hole opening before us, we have passed the boundary of escape and even when the regime has been overturned the black hole will continue to grow so that it will consume this country for decades.”
Paul Lynch Prophet Song Oneworld, 2023. p. 153
Prophet Song is a Booker Prize-winning novel plunging the reader into a chillingly plausible dystopian Ireland, where one mother’s fight to protect her family becomes a haunting portrait of resilience and resistance against an totalitarian government – and the realities of living in a civil war, in a dense, urban city under occupation.
The breathless novel is perhaps now even more chilling to read in the summer of 2025 than in the fall of 2023, when I visited Dublin and picked up this copy. Is it dystopian or prescient? It likely won’t be Ireland, but everyday feels like one of our Western democracies is inching closer to closer to the Prophet Song’s reality.
Thoughts?