Time to leave? On reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023)

Prophet Song won the Man Booker Prize in 2023, a moving novel which describes what happens when a democracy is taken over by fascism.

 The book's opening lines - there are no paragraphs - read like a poem. The versification is mine: 

 

    The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, 

    standing at the window looking out onto the garden.

    How the dark gathers 

    without sound 

    the cherry trees. 

    

How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. 

A feeling I recognise. A friend in New Zealand wonders whether they would know "when it is time to leave". That question is also a chapter heading in Howard Jacobson's latest book, Howl. Everywhere, we Jews are increasingly uncomfortable. At Temple, the volunteer security guards have been given bullet-proof vests and offered lessons in krav maga (unarmed combat).  

Lynch who is Irish wrote the novel in reaction to events in Syria. I wasn't aware of the growing stranglehold which preceded Assad's violence. It was probably not deemed newsworthy..

That was before Trump's second presidency, before ICE was inflicted on Americans, before those who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were deemed to be victims, not perpetrators. 

In The Prophet, events are depicted through the eyes of a mother. (Is there any difference between a father's feelings and those of a mother when their children are in peril?) In the novel, after the initial intimation of threat, the true crisis arises with the disappearance of the father/husband. Lynch describes police interviews, the effect of disappearances and the difficult choices remaining to the mother who struggles to balance the welfare of the children and that of her elderly, half-senile father. 

Syria may be the country which inspired the novel, but Lynch describes a believable process which his readers know could happen anywhere, any time. It is an education.