Why Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is one of the strangest books ever

The 2023 Booker winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is a vastly admirable book, but there is something deeply odd about it: it is a novel about a dystopian coup that takes down Ireland’s ‘liberal democracy’, not about the dystopian coup that was actually happening at the time it was written.

By definition, most novels are stories rendered from imagined events, set in the past, present or future. But there are occasional examples that are fictionalised accounts of real events – almost always, by definition, from the past, and rather contradictorily termed ‘non-fiction novels’ – as well as imagined vistas from the future – almost always dystopias, most famously, George Orwell’s 1984.

But what are we to make of a novel depicting a fictional dystopia that was written while a real dystopia was unfolding outside the window of the room in which it was written? ‘Untruthful fiction,’ perhaps, or ‘novelised evasion’. For Prophet Song, the fifth novel by the Irish writer, is likely to establish its author’s reputation, though not as the 21st century’s Orwell or Solzhenitzyn.