April 24th, 2024

Fascism for You: Prophet Song

I have a book club meeting about Prophet Song by Paul Lynch and sometimes I like to get my thoughts written out before a meeting, so I can see what I actually think before I talk to people about a book and accidentally take on all their views–I’m easily impressionable. I read this book at a fast clip because I wanted to go to the meeting, which more and more I think is the best way for me to read–then I live inside the book, carried along with the characters, and even if I don’t like the book that much I’m inclined to finish it because it has in some way become my life.

I didn’t like Prophet Song that much but I was definitely gripped by it and had no trouble reading quickly. That’s saying something–Lynch has written this incredibly grim miserable story in these massive multi-page paragraphs with everyone’s dialogue run into together with no quotation marks, and I had no trouble with it. The writing is incredibly strong–not beautiful, but servicable and clear–which is usually damning with faint praise but in this case, if it weren’t an extremely well-written book, I likely would have dropped it. So it had to be. I turned in a paper for my night class and the prof said it was fantastic except lack of paragraph breaks so I guess we could say Lynch made an impression.

The novel is actually about Ireland in a present-day alternative reality falling under a fascist regime for unstated reasons and eventually into all-out war, lawlessness, ruin, and chaos. The story is presented through the experiences of one family the Stacks, as viewed through the eyes of the mother, Eilish. Her husband, Larry, leads a teacher’s union and decides to lead a union march early in the novel when things are only mildly oppressive and is disappeared during a garda (police) intervention there. Eilish must continue to work and care for her four children, ranging in age from 1 to 17, as things in the country get stranger and worse.

The reasons for the regime change in Ireland, and how things get so out of hand are completely unstated, as are Eilish and Larry’s reasons for not knowing how the winds are blowing–Lynch just wanted to write a book about fascism in Ireland and so he did, but he didn’t make a convincing argument for how it could take root there (I think one could). I tried not to read too much about this book but I did find out that he has said a few times that he was inspired the Syrian refugee crisis to write PS and then it makes more sense–it is just a different war, transplanted to Ireland and to Irish people. Doesn’t make a tonne of sense but–ok.

Also this week I’ve been watching The Last of Us, which makes an incredibly strong narrative line for how fascism springs up in the United States in an alternative reality that includes zombies (it’s been a rough week for me, content-consumption-wise). Fascism isn’t even the point of that story, just background, but I think TLoU gets it really right in how governments have to do some pretty brutal stuff to stem the zombie tide and then, having alienated citizen trust and gotten used to brutality, they lean on the heavy hand. It’s a logical, thought-out story in a fully-imagined world (even the zombies, heaven help us, kind of make sense).

Neither story is really about the world-building, though, I don’t think–both are ostensibly about the people. Eilish’s life under increasingly tight restraint is drawn in painstaking detail–working and then losing her job, trying to get food, trying to find safe passage for her 17-year-old son before he is drafted on his birthday, trying to deal with her elderly father and his encroaching dementia. It’s all very very realistic, including instances where Eilish is brave and staunch and resolute and situations where she seems cowardly or at least, insistent on not seeing the facts as very obviously presented. I think this is how many of us would cope if our TV and sandwich and alarm clock worlds suddenly became perilous.

Unfortunately, I do not think Eilish is actually a well-drawn character, or much of a character at all–she has no interior life outside of a list of chores and demands, and no backstory, or even memories. Part of this is, I think, Lynch’s desire to write a kind of cypher or blank for every reader to imagine ourselves into–see, see, she’s middle-class, she’s married, she had a nice house and a car–just like YOU! She has a good job, YOU have a good job, reader, don’t you? Am I being too paranoid in thinking that Lynch has imagined the statistically most likely novel reader–a white middle-aged working woman with kids, a husband, a car, and a house–and then shown fascism destroying almost everything she holds dear to remind us that none of us is safe? MAYBE. But Eilish, while her actions are very apt, still sucks as a character. I haven’t read any of Lynch’s other work so I don’t know whether he can write women but I feel failed to write THIS woman. She has no feelings or even thoughts about her children–no memories of their younger years, no thoughts about how they look or funny things they say or hopes for their future. She has no interiority about her husband, his loss, her longing for him, memories of their romance and long marriage. She doesn’t admire his work with the teacher’s union or feel anger that he sacrificed himself for it. She has a single memory of him that repeats throughout the book–sometimes other people say it??–of him coming in the door and yelling for his slippers. Makes him sound like a jackass. Does anyone bring the slippers? Unknown. She is also weirdly self-absorbed. She’s certainly not worried about the wider implications of the demise of Ireland, or what is happening to her fellow citizens. There’s an odd insistence that no one has it worse than the Stacks–no enquiry into what poorer people, unhoused people, not-white people, people without connections are doing throughout the novel. Eilish and her family receive tonnes of help and almost never help anyone else or even feel any sympathy for anyone, but I couldn’t tell if this was a flaw of the novelist or the character.

Nevertheless, Eilish’s dumb paralysis in the face of encroaching disaster is very apt. At first, I felt that the whole character was stupid and she could have taken the opportunities to leave and then I started watching The Last of Us, and Pedro Pascal’s character Joel, who always makes the right decision and is tied to nothing and nearly a super-hero and wondered, who am I most like? I AM a middle-aged woman with a home and a husband and a job, and it would be very hard for me to give up what I have if I could convince myself there was any chance at all I didn’t have to. I have distant relatives who, in the 1930s, were begged by my less distant relatives to come to the US from Eastern Europe, and DIDN’T. They were prosperous where they were, and they knew if they left at a fraught time politically no one would protect their properties, and they would have to start over with nothing in the States. They weren’t young, and the branch that invited them was neither wealthy nor especially kind, but they wouldn’t let a relative actually die if they could prevent it. They couldn’t prevent it–the couple were taken to a concentration camp and the husband was murdered. These are decisions that people make when they are weighing the known versus the unknown.

I didn’t think that Prophet Song was a fantastic artistic object–it moves smoothly, but it’s deeply unpleasant to read, none of the characters seem real, and there were like 10 good lines in the whole thing (one was, when a toddler is forced to sit still in a grocery cart, he howled like his mother had “hauled him feral out of a hole.”) But as an emotional and intellectual exercise, it did something to me, and I will be thinking about it for a long time, and honestly, I guess I recommend folks brace themselves and try it.