Exhausted ! Paul Lynch has no other word to describe his condition. Since November 26, 2023, the day the Booker Prize was awarded for The Song of the Prophet (Prophet’s Song), breathtaking dystopian novel about an Ireland falling into tyranny, the 47-year-old writer has made two or three world tours, sold more than 500,000 copies in English of his bestseller, the rights to which were purchased by a producer British and has been translated in over thirty countries.
However, given the loyalty of his French publisher, Albin Michel, the novelist with TGV speed, small three-day beard, wolf eyes and lamb’s smile, welcomes the press at length in his Dublin lair. Also, at the beginning of December, when, comfortably seated in front of a beer, we asked him what this prestigious prize had changed for him, the answer was clear: “Everything! The day after my victory, my name appeared in 3,000 media outlets and I was somehow catapulted onto the world stage, as I spend my life writing, quietly, from morning to night.” The fifth Irishman to receive the prestigious English-speaking distinction since 1969, Paul Lynch has come a long way. Confidences of Francis Geffard, his publisher from Albin: “Shortly before the prize, Paul was in very bad financial condition, he was coming out of a serious illness, a long Covid, a divorce, with custody of his two children a week out of two. He was reduced to buying a second-hand electric bike.”
But let’s not exaggerate, Paul Lynch did not suddenly go from shadow to light. His four previous novels, A red sky, The morning, Black Snow, Grace And Beyond the sea have all received various prizes and been praised by critics who saw in this former film critic a worthy heir of Cormac McCarthy or even a little brother of Colum McCann, while as a good Irishman, he admits to having “absorbed” Joyce , Beckett and Yeats.
“There is something special in the way our writers approach the language, Irish writing is unique,” confides the author. “You know, I always joke that the English colonized the Irish, but we we have colonized their language.” It was at the age of 30 that the Limerick native decided to devote himself to fiction. “I was in a taxi on the island of Lipari and I had an absolute revelation, this epiphany that I had to write, that I was living a lie and that if I didn’t change my life, I would die a man bitter. I had to enter terra incognita.“
At the end of 2018, another sudden change of direction, Lynch abandoned a manuscript he had been working on for six months. “It was a Friday. I knew deep down that it wasn’t the right book, I’m a storyteller above all and there, I wasn’t telling a story.” The trigger came from rereading the Steppe Wolf by Hermann Hesse, devoured at the age of 20. Harry Haller, his hero, looks at Germany in 1927, and sees chaos, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and the inevitable war to come. “I remembered that passage, and I got a chill, I said to myself, ‘My God, here we are now. It’s different, but we’re here now.”
And that’s how, on Monday, Paul Lynch wrote his first page, with Alice in the center.” Alice? The key character of this novel, wife of a unionist teacher arrested by a secret police, who goes, throughout this edifying story, as distressing as it is exhilarating, trying to protect his four children in an Ireland gradually falling into arbitrariness and violence – until its citizens seek to exile themselves like of all persecuted people of the world. The reader is caught by the throat, in particular because of the style rich in long sentences which propel him closer to the events and emotions, while the absence of paragraphs causes a feeling of claustrophobia and asphyxiation.
In order to make the drama universal, the action takes place in Ireland, a democratic country par excellence, and not in Syria, Ukraine or Gaza. This is because Paul Lynch is very pessimistic: “Yesterday, we had a consensus on what objective truth was, we respected experts and institutions. With social media, objective reason is fragmenting and tribalism, often destructive , takes over civilization.” But let’s be reassured, as Lynch says: “I’m not a prophet, I’m just a novelist.”
The Song of the Prophetby Paul Lynch, trans. from English (Ireland) by Marina Boraso, Albin Michel, 304 p., €22.90.
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