"Prophet Song" and psycho-political projection

A reflection on the iron fist in the rainbow glove

Happy New Year.

I

Irish novelist Paul Lynch was recently crowned the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for his fifth novel Prophet Song. Prior to hearing about his win, I was unfamiliar with Lynch’s oeuvre, and I’ve decided that’s a state in which I shall remain.

When I first heard about the novel, the only thing I knew about it was its central stylistic gimmick (the entire book is told in one unbroken paragraph), which was enough to put me off. (What a chore it must have been to edit, never mind to read.) But after learning about the novel’s premise, I’m even less inclined to check it out.

You see, Prophet Song is set in a near-future dystopia in which a far-right government has come to power in Ireland, and the protagonist’s husband has been abducted by the secret police on account of his trade union organising. This premise would be fine fodder for a thriller or sci-fi novel seeking only to entertain, with no pretensions to having ideas above its station. But no: Lynch takes himself very seriously indeed, and the premise isn’t just a setup on which to tell an exciting, pacy thriller - it’s political commentary, don’t you see? His account of why he wrote the novel is a jaw-dropping exercise in narcissism and self-importance:

“This was not an easy book to write. The rational part of me believed I was dooming my career by writing this novel. Though I had to write the book anyway. We do not have a choice in such matters.”

…During a press conference later on Sunday evening, Lynch said he was “astonished” by the violent disturbances on the streets of Dublin last week. “I recognise that energy is always under the surface, what’s happening in Dublin, we can see [the book] as a warning.”

Given the pace at which Lynch writes, I assume that at least parts of it were written during Covid;Vice ought to have reached out to him for their article about men using lockdown as an opportunity to perfect the art of autofellatio.

But to an extent, I sympathise with his “rational” belief that his career might end up in the toilet as a direct consequence of writing an English-language literary novel based on the idea that “the far-right is bad”. After all, the far-right may not wield any political power in the Anglosphere, or in the film industry, or in the music industry - but you can be damn sure that if you write a novel even suggesting that Viktor Orbán might not be such a top bloke, the publishing industry will blacklist you faster than they would a Holocaust-denying pederast.

This website surveys Americans about their occupations and party affiliations. Publishing and bookselling skews Democrat, as does journalism (a category which presumably includes literary critics). Literally 100% of respondents who list their occupation as “book publisher” identify themselves as Democrats (in case my sarcasm in the previous paragraph wasn’t abundantly obvious). It’s not quite as stratified on the other side of the pond, but publishers who vote Tory represent less than 15% of the industry.

There’s something uniquely irritating about someone who presents themselves as a brave iconoclast for having the “courage” to follow the party line. I’m reminded of John Boyega, who had the gall to suggest that his acting career might be over because of his daring decision to speak at a Black Lives Matter protest (allying himself with such radical countercultural organisations as Adidas, Amazon and Apple - and that’s just the As!).

II

But that’s enough teasing. It’s time to get into the meat of my argument.

Why do I find the premise of this novel so risible? It’s not just that the possibility of the Irish far-right seizing power and transforming the country into a fascist dystopia is so laughably remote as to be almost fantastical - if it’s a “warning”, then it’s of about as much use as a warning about a Dáil made up of a coalition of pixies and unicorns. It’s not just that, like most successful Irish writers of the last decade, Lynch is clearly something of an East Yank whose political concerns were imported wholesale from across the pond - I would find this novel’s premise exactly as contrived and indigestible were it set in the US or Canada (for reasons I’ll get into shortly). No - it’s that Lynch is writing about a hypothetical authoritarian Ireland brought into being by a far-right administration, while ignoring the warning signs of actual democratic backsliding and authoritarianism ringing loudly in his ears every day.

But perhaps “ignore” is the wrong word, and uncharitable of me, so here’s where I’ll delve into the murky waters of attempting to psychoanalyse a writer who I’ve never met and whose published work I’ve never read. Consider that my cards laid on the table for how informed this analysis is, caveat emptor hereon out.

I’m a great admirer of the blogger The Last Psychiatrist, whose posts have an uncanny ability to instil a sense of profound, existential disquiet and unease - one gets the distinct impression that the author knows you personally and can see effortlessly through all of your bullshit cope and seethe. (This is the first article of his I read, and it’s probably as good a place to start as any.) A recurring idea of his is the way people play elaborate mind games with themselves, telling themselves one story as a defense against recognising the uncomfortable truth lurking beneath (“of course I didn’t have a problem when my girlfriend suggested an open relationship - I’m not an insecure manbaby!”).

I suspect that something like this may be at the root of why Lynch wrote Prophet Song, and perhaps even why he claims to have been concerned that doing so might wreck his career.

Any remotely politically aware person living in Ireland in the last five years would have good cause to be concerned about Ireland falling victim to democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. In 2019, the idea that the Irish government would decree that no one can travel more than 2 kilometres from their home was unthinkable - the Covid lockdowns represented an unprecedented seizing of control by the state, an unconscionable incursion into the private lives of Irish citizens, which lasted longer than almost anywhere in the world.¹ Likewise, nobody in 2019 ever dreamed that the simple act of sitting down for dinner in a restaurant would be made conditional on receiving a specific medical intervention and disclosing that you have received said intervention to the bouncer. So many scoffed at me when I said I was worried about vaccine passes being brought in, and assured me they never would be - then they were, and the same people scoffed at me for being concerned about this unprecedented invasion of privacy (“that isn’t happening, and it’s good that it is”). All this, in the interests of preventing the transmission of a virus which killed 1 out of every 200 people in Ireland confirmed to have had it,² overwhelmingly the old, infirm and already sick with existing health conditions.

Earlier this year, a piece of "hate speech" legislation (which, among other things, would make it a criminal offense punishable with jail time to have an “offensive” meme stored on your phone, even if it was sent to you by your annoying uncle in a family WhatsApp group) passed in the Dáil, despite a mere 27% of the public supporting it. At the time of writing, it has not yet passed in the Seanad, but of course the architects of the bill are using last month's race riot as a pretext for pushing for it to be passed (even though it would have done nothing to prevent said riot).

All of these policies or pieces of legislation were introduced and implemented by a coalition government which presents itself as centrist, neoliberal and socially progressive. Meanwhile, the far-right politicians in Ireland are so marginalised that they might as well not exist for how involved they are in the democratic process - no politician who could reasonably be characterised as far-right has ever held public office. [EDIT: A reader provides the examples of Oliver J. Flanagan and Alice Glenn, both of whom were elected to the Dáil. Mea culpa.]

This is also why the premise of Prophet Song would be no less divorced from reality if the novel were set in the US or Canada. “Freezing the bank accounts of anyone even suspected of having donated to a political cause you dislike, without ever arresting them or charging them with a crime” is the kind of behaviour we’d rightly expect from a Central African dictator. But it wasn’t a far-right Canadian prime minister who did such a thing - it was the genocide-apologising, knee-taking Justin Trudeau, who attends Pride parades and offered the smarmy explanation “because it’s 2015” for his decision to appoint a gender-balanced cabinet. Trudeau is living proof, if any were required, that there’s no conflict between a socially progressive worldview and repressive, dictatorial tactics straight out of the Erdoğan playbook - the iron fist in the rainbow glove.

Now, social progressives like Lynch might scoff and roll their eyes at anti-lockdowners, accusing us all of being conspiratorial New World Order nutters who'd step over our own grandmothers' corpses for a pint with our mates. When people like us criticise “hate speech” legislation, I’m sure they’d respond, “if you’re not a racist misogynistic transphobic bigot, you’ve got nothing to worry about”. But on some level, any politically aware person who isn’t terminally naïve must experience some measure of concern about these developments, no matter how much they might try to deny it. Perhaps Paul Lynch reacted to the political developments of the past five years with the same alarm I felt (feel) about Ireland's future.

The problem for Lynch is, he can't imagine a world in which a socially progressive government could also be authoritarian. I don't mean the possibility of such a thing coming to pass has occurred to him, but he's dismissed it as too remote to merit serious consideration: I mean that he can no more conceive of such a thing than he can conceive of a triangle with four sides. For most educated Irish people, "right-wing" and "authoritarian" go hand-in-hand, and the concept of a "left-wing authoritarian state" is an empty set, a term without a referent. I’ve been talking and arguing with people like this for years, and with very few exceptions, they've never heard of the Holodomor, or the Khmer Rouge, or even the Stasi - they think of Cuba as "that place with great healthcare" and nothing else. I've even had a Trinity graduate argue with me that no less Josef Stalin was ACKCHYUALLY far-right, and accused me of doing a disservice to real socialists by lumping them in with him.

III

So, I suspect that Lynch noticed that he was concerned about the possibility of Ireland becoming an authoritarian state in the near future. He couldn't bring himself to confront the possibility that a Fine Gael-led coalition could ever be the instigators of such a state (how could they? They have their pronouns in their Twitter bios!). So the only way he can express his concerns in a way that feels psychologically safe is contriving this absurd scenario in which the far-right seizes power and instates all of the policies he's worried about Fine Gael bringing in (presumably along with some token anti-LGBTQIAA2S+ and anti-immigrant legislation, to improve Lynch's plausible deniability). I don't think Lynch is lying to the readers about what his book is about. I think he's lying to himself. The far-right part of the premise is a fig leaf.

My analysis might even explain Lynch’s baffling claim that he was worried writing the novel could sink his career. Maybe on some level he knew exactly what kind of book he was really writing (a document of his concerns about the authoritarian streak hiding beneath centrists who present themselves as socially progressive) and was worried that someone in the publishing industry might recognise it for what it really was. The idea of an Irish writer being cancelled merely for writing a novel sincerely critical of the far-right is fanciful. The idea of an Irish writer being cancelled for criticising authoritarianism which presents itself as woke and neoliberal (even in densely veiled form) is depressingly plausible. This is, after all, an infamously toxic, backstabbing-prone industry in which young adult novelists routinely get their book deals cancelled because a Twitter mob³ has decided, sight unseen, that the book in question is racist, problematic or what-the-fuck-ever. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas author John Boyne faced a cancellation attempt merely for writing a (sympathetic!) novel about a trans character - because he isn’t trans, therefore it’s not “his story to tell” or some such rubbish.

To the extent that this article has a snappy thesis, it’s this:

• the far-right are an impotent boogeyman who wield no power and influence in Irish society,

• the riots in November didn’t move the needle on this assessment of mine one iota,

• I’ve seen no good evidence to suggest that the Irish far-right will become an important political faction or a meaningful opponent to the Fine Gael-led coalition government any time soon, and

• the people you should be worried about seizing power and trampling on the civil rights and privacy of Irish people are the people recently or currently abusing their power to do so, not some hypothetical near-future political faction.

If Lynch were ever to read this article, I’ve no doubt he’d say my diagnosis of his psychological complex was very wide of the mark. Maybe I’m giving him too much credit, and he’s just a cynical grifter telling the legion of Remainer Guardian readers who follow the Booker longlist exactly what they want to hear (and succeeding admirably). But even if my diagnosis of Paul Lynch is wildly off-base, I don’t think my diagnosis of Irish society is.

1. It’s no accident that these policies were instated following the direct example of an unabashedly totalitarian state currently practising genocide on an industrial scale.

2. It bears repeating that case fatality rates are an imperfect guide for gauging how dangerous a virus is. The case fatality rate is the simple ratio of deaths from Covid to confirmed cases of Covid. Given the number of people who caught Covid without ever being formally tested for it (either because they never thought to get tested because they were asymptomatic, or because they wrote it off as a headcold and never bothered), it’s likely that the infection fatality rate might be 0.25% or lower.

3. I know, I know, it’s called “X” now. But an “X mob” sounds like a group of people who used to be a mob, but have since learned the error of their ways.