EPAWriter Paul Lynch at the Booker Prize presentation in November 2023.
A populist party that has come to power and restricts freedom of expression, a teacher detained by the police for his opinions, a boy who wants to flee the country for fear of the army. It is the image that the Irish writer Paul Lynch paints in his novel Prophet Song (The song of the prophet) about a possible future Ireland. He won the prestigious Booker Prize for it. The Dutch translation will be released this week.
According to some, it is a dystopia, or a romance of doom as we know it from George Orwell (1984) and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale). But Lynch says he didn’t write the book with a bleak view of the future in mind. “The book has been compared to Orwell or Atwood, which is a great honor for me. If you think: this is a future reality, then you may find it dystopian. But you could also say that I describe events that arise from today’s reality .I have written a social realist novel.”
The Prophet’s song centers on the mother of the family, Eilish Stack, who runs the house with four troubled children after her husband’s arrest. She gets into trouble with the meddling government in all kinds of ways. In that respect, the book is similar to previous dystopian novels.
The book responds to what is happening elsewhere in the world.
Paul Lynch
Lynch: “If you live in a democracy, you are used to all the freedoms, such as the right to be active in a trade union. In the book, those fundamental freedoms slowly disappear. But I describe them from Eilish’s perspective, not from a political position.”
However, he does see freedom in the real world under pressure from populism. “The book responds to what is happening elsewhere in the world. When I wrote it there was no war in Ukraine and Gaza. But the book does respond to such situations.”
Censorship in your head
Emy Koopman wrote the Dutch dystopia The book of all fears. She compares Paul Lynch’s book to classic dystopias such as Brave New World van Aldous Huxley en 1984 by George Orwell. “You have an authoritarian government that tries to control everything to the extreme, and you have the few who want to break out of that and find their freedom.”
What this entails is that the authoritarian government falls back on traditional values, as Margaret Atwood describes in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In an America that has degenerated into a religious dictatorship, women have become an oppressed class. “We have seen the return to old-fashioned relations in Poland, we see it in Hungary and Russia. We see the rise of radical right parties everywhere in Europe. You see many populist politicians saying that women should return to a certain place, as one who gives birth and who cooks.”
But besides the censorship of the state, there is also the censorship in your own head, says Emy Koopman. “That is moving along as a precaution. I have been to Hungary for a while and have experienced that the state actually applies little repression in the classic sense, such as arrests and bans. It is often enough to threaten with a ban on publishing, or with a fine or the loss of your job. It’s interesting that you don’t even need that much to be able to oppress people.”
2024-04-05 19:09:28
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