"The Night Has Come and She Has Not Heard the Knocking"

An arresting, ominous opening that summarizes the plight of Eilish Stack, and by extension, her family. The threat of the NAP, the shadowy implicitly Nationalist party that has come to power in near-future Ireland, and the all-consuming dark times they bring with them, have arrived. Eilish has simply not heard them coming. She is too pre-occupied with looking out onto the garden, a representation of such absorption in her peaceful, ordinary, family life, she does not sense the end of that life coming. It is not until "the party", as it is almost always referred to, materializes at her doorstep, in the form of "the two men standing before the porch glass almost faceless in the dark", that her eyes begin to open. By the time Prophet Song opens, it is already too late for Eilish and her family.

As an experience, Prophet Song is an expertly formed trolley problem. A famously re-interpreted series of thought experiments portrayed as a figure holding a lever connected to a set of train tracks. The figure can either send the train down to kill one person or allow it to continue and kill several. From the outset, it is clear that it is already too late, but as the lever is thrust into Eilish' hand, the reader is made a passenger aboard the train, ushered along by the force of the narrative tearing through Eilish' life, beckoning her to pull the lever and save what she can. An effective tool for inspiring emotional turmoil, it is anchored in nuance, in the sympathetic portrayal of Eilish and the unfortunately long list of real-life parallels of the violence that befalls her and her family.

The almost faceless quality of the two GNSB secret police officers runs through the narrative which often makes a point of drawing attention to the human needs that forge dystopias. The rhetoric of the party infects workplaces and schools as NAP appointed authority figures impose their views on all. NAP pins wordlessly destroy lifelong friendships. Yet Paul Lynch treads the line of effective horror writing, never making the party too familiar, or too human. NAP lacks its own flesh, instead living in the flesh it borrows through its soldiers (often the same age as Eilish' eldest child Mark) and the flesh it takes: the loved ones stolen away with no prior warning, leaving gaping wounds in Eilish' life and the lives of all Irish citizens. The NAP is only real through the violence it enacts and the people it enacts it through, which is of course the difficult reality faced by those living through occupation and civil war. Lynch handles this with remarkable precision. Many of the specific policies and the greater history of the party do not ultimately matter: bombs are bombs no matter who drops them and this is not an action thriller about a particular regime coming to power. This is a story about how all such regimes tear lives apart; a story about a mother cradling her children on the floor as the street they grew up on is torn apart by mortars, watching the hands blocking off her street change but not the guns they hold.

One reason for Lynch's standout precision is because he doesn't fall into a trap of both-sides-ism; he is not vague about the party to the point of cowardly centrism. Instead, he fairly presents the rebels emergence as the natural response to occupation. Principally through Mark, the oldest Stack child who is faced with being drafted by the regime that stole his father or living in hiding as a draft-dodging fugitive. He tells his mother "I no longer have my freedom, you need to understand, there is no freedom to do or to be when we give in to them. I cannot live my life like that, the only freedom left to me is to fight." A sentiment held by millions of young people throughout history who leave their families to take up arms against those who seek to own them. But while there is an admirable resolve in Mark's decision, Lynch is not telling a story about noble sacrifices and underdog rebel-heroes. This is a war and Mark is not a hero to his mother; he is someone, her child, whom she loves, who is gone and whose return Eilish clings to for so long she misses her chance to pull the lever. And tragedy escalates.

While the author never focuses on the party's exact politics, there are enough hints to fill in the blanks. Of course, there is the fact that NAP stands for "National Alliance Party" which immediately evokes Nationalism and the deadly National Socialist Party. The only explicit stance taken by the NAP is its anti-union position which concretely disqualifies it from being a left-wing party and frames it squarely as an enemy of the common people. This is not to say that Lynch's novel is an explicitly left-wing tale. It's more a case of enough hints to ground the reader's interpretation in the real and ongoing rise of the far-right and throughout Europe, the emergence of fascism and fascist policies. The hints continue to darken the novel's political climate and strengthen its emotional impact as a piece of dystopian speculative fiction.

Structurally, Lynch uses his narrative form as an effective storytelling tool and by now, Prophet Song is famous for its unconventional style told with few paragraph breaks. The story plays out as massive walls of text made of bricks upon bricks of run-on sentences which not only create a sense of urgency, of anxious rush even in times of ostensible calm, they rob the reader of agency just as Eilish is robbed of agency. The reader is denied control of the pace of their experience just as Eilish and her fellow citizens are robbed of the calm lives they once possessed and took for granted. The parties are propelled through the story as though alone on a raft, adrift, hurtling through a violent sea. Towards the end of the novel, an unnamed character (in order to best represent the common people), memorably echoes this sentiment: "I think what I'm trying to say is that I used to believe in free will, if you had asked me before all this I would have told you I was free as a bird, but now I'm not so sure, now, I don't see how free will is possible when you are caught up within such a monstrosity, one thing leads to another thing until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do." This idea of powerlessness in the face of decaying normality, of being paralyzed while watching all you love and depend on, taken away from you, is the spine of Prophet Song - a moving, tightly written response to the horrors that occupation and war inflict on the common people.