[I read this 2023 novel in four sections, writing about each section before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
13 August 2024
Parts 1 and 2, and some of Part 3
Why am I not finding this more compelling? I would have expected a novel like this to press some buttons, as a sympathetic, public-spirited family is slowly torn apart by an increasingly autocratic regime. After all, these people are just like us. Aren’t they? Dedicated public scientist mother, dedicated teachers’ union father, both of them trying to bring up their children—including the fourth, something of a surprise—and succeeding and failing in the kind of ways we all do….
Maybe the problem is that those buttons it ought to be pressing are a little too obvious. Almost a year after it won the Booker Prize, everybody reading it knows the novel’s dystopian premise, that a present-day democracy swiftly and inexorably descends into becoming a Party-led police state. Who doesn’t recognise the signs? The late-night knock on the door, the disappearances, the unannounced retraction of one hard-fought right after another…. This is how it must have been in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union under Stalin, in Pinochet’s Chile—in countless countries since the middle of the 20th Century. This is stuff we think we know about.
But we don’t, of course. Knowing about those places—and places in the 21st Century that people are still having to live in—is not the same as having to endure the transformation. The task that Paul Lynch has set himself is to force us to imagine exactly how it would feel—and what he has come up with is the most straightforward thought experiment imaginable. We know, literally from the first page, that what we are going to get is a recognisable present that will gradually evolve or mutate into a cruel and terrifying new order. It couldn’t be a simpler premise.
Or, let’s face it, a more difficult one to bring off. We’ve all read dystopic novels, set in a Britain run along Stalinist lines or a United States governed by a misogynistic theocracy that has reduced women to servility and sex slavery. But Lynch has made it hard for himself. In Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale the main characters are already trapped inside the new reality when the novels open. The decline from a recognisable reality has already happened, and in each case we only find out about how through the imperfect lens of memory or traumatised flashbacks. Paul Lynch doesn’t have that option, because the changes have to happen in real time. He has deliberately chosen a limited viewpoint—we see everything through the eyes of Eilish Stack—but that only presents another challenge. How to make the slow dawning of a strong, intelligent woman’s understanding seem plausible? She might not know she’s in a dystopic fiction, but we do—and isn’t there a danger that she might seem a bit slow off the mark sometimes?
Maybe I’m not being fair. I’m thinking about a particular moment, when Eilish has to make a routine visit to some office or other to check up on the progress of passport applications for her youngest children. But things have changed. A simple bit of form-filling has become a terribly big deal, and Eilish is stunned and amazed. This can’t be right, she tells the apparatchik with his dead eyes, this is her constitutional right… and so on. But the man reminds her that her husband has been detained for the past fourteen weeks, at the mercy of a state which, we already know, has signed off laws that make a nonsense of the old constitution. Shortly after this, the bodies of two boys who had protested against a new regime in school are returned to the parents—this just a matter of weeks (I think—it all happens so fast) after forced conscription for seventeen-year-olds has just been announced. Or not announced. It seems that Mark, Eilish and Larry’s son, won’t be studying for his A Levels, because boys like him are being called up.
As I was writing earlier, this is an ordinary family—so readers ought to be appalled by what is happening to them. And as I was also writing earlier, it isn’t really working for me. Maybe that’s because I’m only a quarter of the way through the novel, and all this is merely scene-setting for the drama to come. Maybe. But I can’t help wondering why Paul Lynch didn’t begin his novel at this point, when the State has already made it clear that all protest is useless. For me, the swift decline from a recognisable normality to Stasi-like brutality—one character has even name-checked the East Germans in order to deny that it exists in their 21st Century world—has been too fast, and too implausible. We all know that in the early 2020s, a lot of Western democracies have sometimes felt to be in danger. A conservative government in the UK wishing to bypass legal restraints, the US legal system undermined by a president determined to get his own way—these are the stuff of everyday concern. But in Lynch’s alternate reality, not a single character has been taking any of that seriously. The State has blindsided absolutely everybody, using the well-thumbed playbook nobody in this universe seems to have heard of before. It’s all come as a terrible surprise.
And one last thing before I read on. Paul Lynch is very careful to keep any sense of a real political world out of it. It’s a given in this rather sketchy universe that the State can do these terrible things, just like that. Within weeks, a well-oiled machine is in place, and I’m guessing that because the tropes are familiar the reader is to find them plausible. Ah yes, it could so easily happen, we say, nodding wisely. Thank goodness this author is sending us this warning before it’s too late. (The Guardian tells me it’s an urgent and important book, so it must be.)
The rest of Part 3, and Parts 4 and 5
A tiny bit of plot development, little of it any sort of surprise. But it’s become clearer that this isn’t what Paul Lynch is interested in. Really, Eilish is an Everywoman, or Everywoman in a society sliding into tyranny. He wants us to think about all those times we’ve watched it on the news, the women grieving over disappeared husbands and sons, and try to imagine the unbearable pressures they are under. More than in the earlier part of the novel, the disruption to normal family dynamics is what is really hitting home—no pun intended—as Eilish finds herself dreaming about those ordinary times, so recently ended, when she took it all for granted. The sound of Larry arriving home, the noise of him and the kids disagreeing about the TV or in the next room, all those ‘nothing’ days—her word—that seem unimaginable now.
They weren’t nothing, of course, they were everything, and sometimes their sudden disappearance feels more upsetting to her than the enforced disappearance of her husband. (This is literally true. For some reason, Larry’s absence from their lives is something that never quite seems as vertiginously harrowing as we might expect. Literally months have passed and, surely, each new night alone would be a torture. If it is, Paul Lynch isn’t telling us about it.) Now, having hidden for some days and weeks in the secluded granny-flat behind his mother’s friend Carole’s house, Mark has disappeared into a resistance movement. Only the occasional call from a burner phone lets her know he’s still alive.
Lynch seems to be more interested in recreating, from the inside, all the recognisable external signs of this form of oppressive clampdown. After Mark’s name and address are published in the newspapers, along with hundreds of others evading the new conscription law, three black-clad men come in the night to noisily smash the car windscreen and piss on the seats. Then they daub ‘TRAITOR’ all over it and, much more threateningly, all over the house. Eilish gathers her children around her, starting with the vulnerable fourteen-year-old Molly, and hides them in the bathroom—while knowing that if the men want to enter the house they could do it easily. For some reason, neither she nor Paul Lynch puts into words the full horror of what these men could do if they wanted… but luckily, this time, they don’t.
What else does she have to endure, all the time literally or metaphorically gathering her babies to her to keep them safe? Before Mark agrees to hide, she has to try to make him understand how it feels for a mother to look on while a son talks of going to find his father. In their urgent conversations, Lynch does a good job of letting us see the clash of two completely reasonable mindsets. A mother can’t possibly allow her son to sacrifice himself in a fight he will almost certainly lose, while the son of a good man imprisoned without trial can’t carry on without doing something about it. It’s the age-old et cetera, and Paul Lynch gives us a convincing enough version of how it would play out. And he lets us in on how it will unfold in its inevitable way. After he’s been at Carole’s for a while—Lynch is vague about the timings, although we know that winter has moved into spring by now—he’s gone, as we knew he would be.
Is that another problem that Lynch has? The sense of inevitability is bound to lead to the danger of the recognisable shading into the predictable—so what the author has to do is make the reader care anyway. And there need to be times, as there would in the lives of Eilish and her family, when there’s a stomach-turning realisation that an awful possibility has come to pass. For me—and you know what I’m going to say next—the moments come and go without the sickening internal lurch. I’m finding it hard to care, probably—for the reasons I’ve already made clear enough—because I’m finding it hard to believe.
Any more plot developments? Not a great number, beyond the almost plodding succession of dreadful, all too recognisable events. After the confirmed deaths of the two boys early in Part 3 a short-lived protest movement gathers itself in ways we recognise from the Arab Spring or the Hong Kong ‘Umbrella’ protests. It’s short-lived for the inevitable reason. After most people tire of it and drift away, the authorities can send in the police and shoot or arrest the determined few hundred who remain. Meanwhile, over a longer time-frame than we might expect, Eilish is squeezed out of her job by the card-carrying new bosses.
But it’s the personal that Lynch likes to focus on. Carole, married but childless, is even more frantic than Eilish. She has tried to deal with the ‘Curfew’—the totalitarian evil uncle of the Covid lockdowns we all remember—by learning to bake bread and cakes nobody wants. It’s (deliberately, I’m guessing) almost farcically familiar, but for Carole it’s different. She’s trying to turn her attention from the tragedy in her life, that her own husband is also one of the disappeared. And, unlike Eilish, she has no family around her to drive her mad and keep her sane. Eilish is shocked by Carole’s desperation, and by the probable truth she wants to force Eilish to face. They won’t be seeing their husbands again, ever.
It’s a thought Eilish has never allowed herself to have—which, of course, is one way of staying sane. Is the new thought going to make it all the harder? Or is it going to galvanise her into doing something new?
Parts 6 and 7
Nope. Nothing new here, just more ingredients added to a long list. Two lists, in fact—it was while reading these sections that I realised not only how ingredients-heavy this novel is, but how there are ingredients relating to the tyrants’ (and resistance fighters’) playbook—those endlessly recognisable little details of distant mortar-fire and makeshift barricades—and a completely different set relating to Eilish’s personal stress and trauma. I mentioned last time that it’s the latter that Paul Lynch focuses on, and I’m absolutely sure it’s why the Booker panel loved it so much. We might be bored by the DIT elements—that’s Descent Into Tyranny—but the ‘Let’s imagine what it would be like’ elements are his selling-point. I’ve made this point before, and it doesn’t make it any more interesting that Lynch keeps adding to them. Don’t get me wrong, Eilish is a lovely woman, surprising herself (and occasionally the reader) by her seemingly instinctive thoughtfulness and acts of kindness. But her perfectly believable womanly empathy doesn’t make the unfolding of the novel’s events believable. I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself.
There’s also an issue with a narrative choice that Lynch has made. So far, having set the beginning of the novel some time before Christmas, he’s brought us round to spring and beyond. We don’t know exactly how far beyond, because Lynch doesn’t have a strict timetable in place. The garden flowers suggest it’s the summer now. OK. But he tells it through short, individual scenes, each of which illustrates a new challenge or headache. It’s no wonder that the reader might sometimes be a little bemused by just how a woman like Eilish would cope with the anxious, minute-by-minute horror of it all, and the sheer logistics of getting through every day, week, and month. A lot of things just happen to Eilish and, after a few pages, Lynch moves things on. There isn’t any continuity or character development when Eilish’s main role seems to be coping against the odds with the next damn’ thing.
So what happens? Starting with the nasty police state storyline, it’s ever more strict censorship, failing services, food shortages—and, when the resistance fighters start to gain ground, relentless ‘targeted’ retaliatory strikes that aren’t really targeted at all. Early on, Eilish has a ringside view as her own street becomes part of the front line between pro- and anti-government forces. Then there’s a rebel checkpoint set up there, so Lynch can have Eilish make the heartfelt point that so-called freedom fighters shouldn’t be taking away the freedoms of ordinary people like her and her family. That’s telling them—and, I’m tempted to think, it allows Lynch to tick the idea off his checklist. At the point I’ve reached, there’s a kind of impasse. The government is defying international outrage and sanctions—leading to shortages of almost everything—and there are rumours that the resistance fighters are going to be surrounded. No shocks there.
But most, if not all of Lynch’s creative energy goes into getting the reader inside Eilish’s head. He sticks to the conventions, keeping it strictly third-person limited, and he manages it perfectly well. Yes, we think—just as we’ve thought from the beginning—it probably would feel like this. So, Lynch takes a recognisable feature of civilian life on the front-line, and does his best to imagine Eilish into the situation. She’ll have to go through these steps to find food, get the kids to school (before the general closure of schools that inevitably comes at last) without the car she’s had to sell, get them all sleeping downstairs because upstairs is just too dangerous with shells flying around. Getting the big mattress downstairs would be like this, waking up to your twelve-year-old son where you were dreaming your husband was would be like this… and so on, and on. Dreams are a big thing because, well, they would be, wouldn’t they? And the shock of waking would be awful. Is it awful for Eilish? It’s pretty awful.
And then there are the tricky bits of family life that keep bubbling up to make things difficult. Molly, having been the typical bolshie adolescent, is now worryingly prone to depression. Bailey, twelve (or nearly thirteen by now) is growing up startlingly fast, constantly making his own demands and having the look of his missing older brother more every day. There’s baby Ben, at the point now of teething painfully and needing to be weaned—although there’s been surprisingly little of the unique bonding of the mother/baby relationship, now I think of it, confirming for me that the baby is just another damn’ thing added to Eilish’s list of problems—and…and what? Eilish manages without going mad—possibly because Lynch doesn’t quite make the situation ever seem quite maddening enough, despite everything.
And I don’t think I mentioned Eilish’s old dad, once quite the radical but now just another all too recognisable victim of slowly advancing dementia. He lives on the other side of town, increasingly hard to reach now that Eilish is reduced to borrowing an old pushbike. He’s another ingredient—but Lynch gets rid of him to Canada in a weird little plot-twist that Lynch hasn’t worked hard enough to make convincing. Eilish has had a strange little visit from a member of an underground railroad network funded by wealthy enough relatives who live outside the country. Eilish’s sister has made a down-payment on getting Eilish and all the family away… but Eilish can’t let herself do it. Larry is still missing, Mark is God knows where—and what about her poor old father? But at least Lynch is able to have her use the roll of banknotes the messenger brings to get through some of that inevitable black-market nonsense. Later, she’s frantic when her father goes missing from his house, leaving the stupid dog he’s kept since the beginning of the crisis. But guess what? He’s taken up her sister’s offer of an escape route. You couldn’t make it up—but it saves both Eilish and Paul Lynch having to worry about the old man again.
Parts 8 and 9—to the end
Ah—now I see why this book was praised by so many readers. After the seven-section overture we’ve had so far, Lynch takes Eilish into some genuinely harrowing situations. Alleluia, I thought—it’s been a long time coming, and I wished Eilish’s internal life had all been as richly presented, if not necessarily so viscerally, pitilessly pummelled as in these last two sections. Why hadn’t we seen her as vertiginously unbalanced by Larry and Mark’s disappearances as we see her being when Bailey is in danger? Why has nearly a year passed without her reaching anything remotely like the pitch of terror and despair that we begin to see now? I’m guessing that Lynch needed his Everywoman to miss the signs that were definitely there for her to see. And, meanwhile, I’m sure he wanted things to appear normal—or normal enough—for us to have time to get to know and care about Eilish. But really, he didn’t need her to be so slow on the uptake for so long. I just found myself becoming annoyed.
But that was before. Right at the start of Part 8, the life of her family erupts into more chaos in a single day than we’ve seen in weeks or months—and at last, Lynch has finally got to the point. Bailey is injured in a sudden eruption of violence on their doorstep. Good lad that he is, he is trying to help their neighbours, but now he needs hospital care that suddenly becomes very hard to find. Eilish goes with him—how old is he, thirteen?—and there are ad hoc volunteer drivers who know, or think they know, how to avoid the road blocks. And, after the first of many terrible rides in these chapters, one of them gets the boy into what might or might not be the right hospital. Alleluia, again…
…but no. A big feature of the Prophet Song universe is a piercingly hostile bureaucracy. Even hospital staff who want to be helpful are forced into corners… and when, after having been made to find her perilous way back home—no visitors allowed overnight, we’re sorry to have to say—she returns next morning to find him gone. And so on. She makes ever more dangerous journeys from hospital to hospital until… etc. The bottom line is, Bailey’s name must have come up on a dissident database (I’m surmising here), and he’s in a military hospital. Except it isn’t a hospital, and Eilish has to force her way into some bureaucrat’s office in order to be told, finally, that he isn’t there. Does she want to see the list? No? Does she want—and I can’t remember all the steps it takes to reach this next point—does she want to see if his body is in the morgue? Why would she want to do that…? The answer being, of course, that nobody would. But she has no more leads on where else he might be.
The next part, in the morgue, is a scene we’ve seen versions of in as many newsreels as action movies. She finds her poor boy, his face almost unrecognisable and with unspeakable injuries to other parts of his body. As a generic presentation of what has been a daily event in different parts of the world for most of this century, it’s terribly moving. I even began to feel a little bit convinced…
…except, still, Lynch never offers any back story. Every single conflict or crackdown or bureaucratic nightmare that we’ve ever known of has a story behind it. But not this one, and it’s fundamental to what I see as Paul Lynch’s failure. Eilish, from now on, becomes even more of an Everywoman, the mother looking after her two remaining children as, inevitably, they become refugees. Both Ben and Molly are vulnerable, he because he’s only a year or so old, and she because adolescent girls are prey to all kinds of threats from men in positions of power. Lynch takes things to the very edge when a man who can get them to their next destination—I soon lost count of how many destinations, dangerous truck journeys and stinking waiting rooms they encounter—makes it clear that leaving Molly alone with him would really, really make things easier for them all. Luckily, Eilish still has enough money, just, to pay him off instead. Phew.
And, by the end, they have become boat people. The right palms have been greased, a few lucky breaks have been seized, and… and that’s it. They’re out at sea, on their journey to who knows where, and to whatever hostile reception they have been told to expect. If this were more than a thought experiment, it would be quite moving. Instead, all we can do is muse on the knowledge that this is happening to an awful lot of real people in the world—and regret that we’ve spent so much time on a fiction that always feels entirely context-free. The place where they are headed, presumably, is Great Britain. But, take it or leave it, this is a Britain that is not going to welcome refugees from its near neighbour. It’s as though the recent acceptance of displaced Ukrainians had never happened because, in what is the most trope-driven issues novel I’ve read for a long time, welcoming refugees is the wrong kind of trope.
We can read it for you wholesale 