Singing. About dark times

“It is not a dream of storm weather that follows Bolivar into the town, but words overheard last night, perhaps in Gabriela’s bar, that give him the feeling now of a dream.” With this powerful opening sentence begins Beyond The Sea (Oneworld Publications, 2019), the Booker-winning Irish novelist Paul Lynch’s fourth novel.

His oeuvre is a result of a deep engagement with the porous worlds of dreams and realities. And his craft reflects the hyperaware writer-artist at work. Lynch places his characters in a world where the maturity of interactions between them demonstrates his intelligible approach towards achieving emotional depth. The superimposition of all these elements is his latest, the pitch-perfect Prophet Song — a paralysing, dark novel that seems more real than fiction.

A mother of four, Dublin-based microbiologist Eilish — the principal character in the book — is confronted by a nightmarish situation overwhelming her, threatening her family. The undercurrent of the state’s arms gnawing at all forms and nature of resistance is visible right from the opening sentence of the book. What’s remarkable though is Lynch’s ability to strike a balance between his understated efforts to create an eerie environment by supplying the minutest of details and the overemphasised anxieties of his characters. The epigraph of his book reveals his intent clearly. He quotes Ecclesiastes 1:9 about the repeatability of incidents and the sameness of dangers in all ages and Bertolt Brecht’s meditation on what would the creation of a work of art in the dark times be like:

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.

The singing — or production of any art form — in a dark time is always a result of trying to locate oneself in that madness one is surrounded by. It’s a result of being faced with this question, which can be an individual or a collective quest: “How did we get here?” Sample this sentence from Prophet Song that attempts to articulate it slightly differently: “All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.” It’s that pivotal moment at which the book gains a principled momentum, incidents follow, a sort of resistance germinates, and along with all of it, everything that’s endangered as a result — family, people, and a nation in the wake of totalitarianism — starts becoming hyper-visible to all.

A considered meditation on modern-day reality and the challenges facing the entire species, the book has been called Orwellian and dystopian. A deeper read however will reveal that the narrative breaks away from all such labels and does so for several reasons, some of which Lynch explained in an interaction with DHoS at the Jaipur Literature Festival. This is his first visit to India, a country at the cusp of a transformation, which many argue, can potentially harm its foundational values. Excerpts 

In an interview, you shared that Prophet Song could’ve potentially ended your career. What made you say so, and given the success, how do you feel about having written this ‘career-ending’ book?

Prophet Song is a dark book. It’s unflinching. It doesn’t avert its gaze. It stares at the Medusa head-on. And a book like that can be dangerous for a writer because we live in a world where people want to be consoled; they don’t want the truth. But I think the job of serious fiction is to be as truthful as possible, so I had to follow the story of this book relentlessly and I worried that this book may be too truthful and too dark. The fear is that it’s very hard to be published when you sell 500 copies. It has happened to me before with my second book, but I believe in truth and the more truthful you are, the more defining the book becomes. And people tend to find such books more meaningful and valuable.

The Booker win must have opened a world of possibilities for you like any such major win tends to do to anyone. I was wondering if you could reflect on what it didn’t and cannot do for you...

It doesn’t allow you to write. When you write, you access the best version of yourself; you access the part of your mind that makes you the happiest because when you write, you disappear from the day-to-day, and you disappear to the world that asks you to meet your obligations all day long. When you’re writing, it’s all silence, and your life becomes addicted to that. And when you are not writing, you lose the best part of yourself.

So, that’s what the Booker doesn’t do for you: it doesn’t give you the best part of yourself; it creates a persona of you, and forces you to wear a mask all day long, and I don’t want to wear a mask at all. I wear a very light mask anyway. But what you see is largely what I am and what you get.

You explore the contemporary post-truth scenario in which the state and its arms are monstrously controlling the narrative. The word democracy doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore, and people are faced with this new reality in which they don’t even know what’s real. Take us through the world-building of Prophet Song and what was it like to populate your characters in such a setting.

Anytime a writer is answering this question, it’s rationalisation after the fact because what happens between the pen and the pages is mysterious. But I can tell you what was going on in the world when I was working on the book.

It was December 2018 when I started writing Prophet Song, and we had Brexit and we had [Donald] Trump. Those two events were monumental political changes. And all around Europe there was a lurch towards the right—a sort of lurch towards nativist nationalism, and it is something we have not seen in a long time.

Populism has been increasing ever since. Dissatisfaction in the modern world democracies is at an all-time high.

And we are in a post-truth world; we are at a point where the reality consensus is no longer held. There were disagreements but overall, there was a consensus on what reality actually was. But now there has been a rupture. And a lot of people have gone down the rabbit hole, and they think the world is a very, very different place.

This is deeply concerning because these are very epistemological questions — these are the questions about how we understand the world that we are living in, and once you start to unravel something like that you witness the disruption of the reality. So, with Prophet Song, I was just trying to see into the modern chaos and asking myself this question where am I in all this...

Interesting that you say this because more than ever before I believe fiction writers are competing with an unimaginable reality. How do you think they’re coping with it?

With long sentences. And no paragraph breaks. The sense of being in a literary space is so vastly different from the social media space because it allows thoughts to be unfolded and interpreted. In that space, thought can be allowed to wander and get to the mountaintop to see complexity for what it is. Whereas, in the day-to-day world, we’re atomised by technology, we’re completely fragmented. How can we know the world when we’re fragmented? How can we even know ourselves when we’re fragmented? So, I believe I don’t think we know ourselves anymore.

This is why I say that fiction writers are secretly at war with the modern world. It’s existential for fiction writers. Because the brain is being rewired against the natural capacity to read fiction; it’s actually getting rewired towards distraction. It’s a challenge. But I can see now among young people that there’s a vanguard. For example, even the phenomenon of BookTok or BookTube is in itself something to be welcomed because here we are on social media platforms completely atomising our attention spans.

The reason why it’s coming out [BookTok or BookTube] is because people are trying to go back from the digital. We need some tangibility in the world. For art, we need to be able to be quiet, and I think fiction allows you to do that. So, I think it’s marvellous that this whole generation, while not giving up on technology, is recognising that something else is required for a considered, happier life.

Besides Prophet Song, I have read Beyond the Sea. It’s starkly different from Prophet Song for it’s much more subliminal, and dialogic. I was wondering if Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was in any way an inspiration.

Well, Melville influences my sentences. And I wouldn’t say that Moby Dick is a direct influence on that book, but I’d say one important thing which is that when people begin to read Moby Dick, they say, “Aha, this book is about whaling.” Then, they get halfway through and they’re like: “Aha, this is about obsession.” And then, they get to the end, and they see into the void, and they go: “Ahaa, this book is about the absolute.” And Prophet Song is a book about the absolute.