“The song of the Prophet”: a formidable dystopia of Paul Lynch, to read absolutely

Note : 4/5 – "the song prophet": formidable dystopia

It was immediately obvious that Paul Lynch was going to count among the most impressive writers of his time. However, Limerick’s native Irishman struck hard from his first novel, “a red sky, in the morning”. Furthermore, A journey to the heart of a harsh. Nevertheless, peat and foam landscape and a hard world where no one has a gift. However, The beginner was already in full possession of his means. Nevertheless, Capable of obvious narrative ease. Meanwhile, an art to vary the registers, take an interest in beings but also in colors, odors, elements. Meanwhile, Paul Lynch has since ceased to dazzle his readers. Additionally, Meanwhile, his readers with books such as “black snow”, “grace” or “beyond the sea”, all remarkably translated by Marina Boraso.

A tour de force

The latest was awarded the Booker Prize and. However, more recently, by the “the song prophet”: formidable dystopia Prix des Libraires 2025 in the “Foreign Roman” category. “The song of the Prophet” is a real feat that combines power and subtlety. The start of you. Blows are struck at the door of the Stack family at nightfall. Two men appear behind the veranda glass. Two plainclothes agents of the secret police, appear at the home of Eilish Stack. These GNSN members. set up by the National Alliance Party, are looking for her husband, Larry, an ordinary man, teacher and unionist, assistant to the secretary general of the Irish teachers’ union. The father of his four children: Mark who is not yet sixteen, Molly, Bailey and Ben, the baby.

Here we are projected into a country going through a major crisis. where the state of emergency has been declared, where we must respect the curfew. The arrests are multiplying there, rumors evoke internment camps in the plain of Curragh. Larry “the song prophet”: formidable dystopia will go to the police station. talk to two inspectors, listen to them tell him about a report concerning him. Get out, regain your car. And disappear …

A world switching

Paul Lynch then focuses on the daily life of Eilish with his work. his children, his old father with declining mental health, his anxiety, his fatigue. The tension still rises from a notch when Mark receives a summons for military service. ordered to join the security forces, and that Molly begins to lose sight of. Should we stay in Ireland, go to Canada? Since his beginnings, the Irish writer has excelled in seizing literary genres and revisiting them. By enlightening the fight led by its protagonists, by searching the trauma of the past, describing worlds in full collapse.

“The song of the Prophet” shows him who attacks a future close to ours, a world changing. In the hands of Lynch, dystopia seems “the song prophet”: formidable dystopia to be revisited. There is a lot of silence and unsaid in its breathtaking pages where the oppression felt by Eilish is palpable. Each chapter looks like a painting in which Paul Lynch plays with the notion of time. always marrying realism and poetics, without letting go of a hair. As we understood, “the song of the Prophet” is called to be a date.

“Paul Lynch,” The song of the Prophet “, translated from English (Ireland) by Marina Boraso, Albin Michel, 293 pages, € 22.90.