The morning after the Booker Prize 2023 event in London, Irish writer Paul Lynch, who won the prestigious £50,000 literary honour for his dystopian novel Prophet Song, was still in shock. “I don’t quite believe it,” Lynch told TOI.
“I feel as though I have entered into a counterfactual narrative that parallels my usual life. I probably should be in the kitchen at home, making a cup of coffee or something like that.And this is the sliding door thing that I’m actually riding. At any moment now, I’ll be returned to my normal life. I’ll have to get in the car and go do some shopping and collect the kids from school, that kind of thing.”
Prophet Song imagines an Ireland that has descended into totalitarianism. “We’re always trying to think of the end of the world as this sort of global catastrophe,” he said, discussing the book. “Really, the end of the world is something that comes to comes to communities. It comes to people who are in plight.”
Lynch, 46, added: “Ukraine has happened, and the Israeli Gaza-Palestine conflict has happened. And the book anticipates this because that’s part of the idea of the book is that what’s happening now will happen again and has always happened.”
In his acceptance speech, Lynch quoted the apocryphal gospels: “If you use what is within you, it will save you. If you do not use what is within you, it will destroy you. My writing has saved me.”
Asked about it, he told TOI: “The question of free will has always been in my novels. I’m deeply interested in aligning on the page two seemingly separate forces. One is the individual… We all are feeling, passionate creatures. We search for meaning and we are trying to make sense of the world around us. But there are these enormous, implacable alien forces that are shaping us, moving our lives, casting us around like specks of dust. How are we to make sense of this? Prophet Song is, in many ways, about this. All my books are about this. How do we understand ourselves? How do we define who we are? These are all questions, but I’m seeking to answer them in my own way.”
“I feel as though I have entered into a counterfactual narrative that parallels my usual life. I probably should be in the kitchen at home, making a cup of coffee or something like that.And this is the sliding door thing that I’m actually riding. At any moment now, I’ll be returned to my normal life. I’ll have to get in the car and go do some shopping and collect the kids from school, that kind of thing.”
Prophet Song imagines an Ireland that has descended into totalitarianism. “We’re always trying to think of the end of the world as this sort of global catastrophe,” he said, discussing the book. “Really, the end of the world is something that comes to comes to communities. It comes to people who are in plight.”
Lynch, 46, added: “Ukraine has happened, and the Israeli Gaza-Palestine conflict has happened. And the book anticipates this because that’s part of the idea of the book is that what’s happening now will happen again and has always happened.”
In his acceptance speech, Lynch quoted the apocryphal gospels: “If you use what is within you, it will save you. If you do not use what is within you, it will destroy you. My writing has saved me.”
Asked about it, he told TOI: “The question of free will has always been in my novels. I’m deeply interested in aligning on the page two seemingly separate forces. One is the individual… We all are feeling, passionate creatures. We search for meaning and we are trying to make sense of the world around us. But there are these enormous, implacable alien forces that are shaping us, moving our lives, casting us around like specks of dust. How are we to make sense of this? Prophet Song is, in many ways, about this. All my books are about this. How do we understand ourselves? How do we define who we are? These are all questions, but I’m seeking to answer them in my own way.”
