Prophet Song

Eilish Stack is a molecular biologist with four children and a husband in the teachers' union, and one evening two men from the newly formed secret police arrive at her door in Dublin asking for Larry. Ireland has elected a party that has begun rewriting emergency powers, and the process by which a functioning democracy becomes something else is, in Lynch's account, entirely procedural: a tribunal here, a detention there, a demonstration that is filmed and then investigated. Larry goes to a rally and does not come back. Eilish's sister telephones from Canada, telling her plainly to get the children out, and Eilish cannot, because there is her father sinking into dementia, because there is a job, because the paperwork for a passport now goes through offices that are watching her. Lynch writes in long unbroken paragraphs without quotation marks, a rushing present tense that never lets the reader step back, and the novel narrows as the state closes: shortages, checkpoints, a son of conscription age, and finally a civil war in the streets Eilish shops in. It is a deliberately unbearable book, written in the conviction that what happens to other countries is not owed to any quality those countries lack.