Losing All Life's Certainties: Paul Lynch's Prophet Song

Lynch’s Booker-winner is divisive. While Chris Murray wonders whether the characters in Prophet Song could be fleshed out, and the story of a fascist Ireland more fully realised, his guest says that this misses the point. Professor Christopher Morash (Trinity College Dublin) argues that Lynch’s purpose is to explore what happens to a person whose identity is gradually eroded. In a vividly portrayed suburban Dublin that steadily slips from view, narrator Eilish Stack first loses her husband, then her profession and her home, and faces the prospect of losing her children too. Morash says that Lynch is most interested in this reduction of a person to her basic impulse to survive, and that the story of Ireland’s decline into an authoritarian state is only a device to achieve this. While recent politics have made Prophet Song topical, Morash suggests that paying too much attention to the book’s political dimension means misreading Lynch’s experiment in ‘radical empathy’. Morash refers to playwright Sean O’Casey to show the Irish literary tradition at work in Prophet Song, in which civil war is so mutually harmful that the specific politics cease to matter. Murray wonders whether the book is too bleak, but Morash says that the closing image of the sea signals hope. Which perspective on Prophet Song seems right to you?

LINKS:
Irish Books Podcast on Blogspot: https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com

Follow the Irish Books Podcast channel on WhatsApp

Buy Prophet Song: https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/prophet-song-9780861545896

Guest:
Christopher Morash http://www.tcd.ie/English/staff/academic-staff/chris-morash.php

The Irish Books Podcast is proudly produced by East Coast Studio with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Monash University

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.