Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, published by Grove Press, 2023, 320 pages.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, published by Hamish Hamilton, 2023, 645 pages.

Review by Usha Raman

The scariest dystopian novels are those that seem to be set on the inside edge of our times. Anyone who reads the daily news (or worse, watches it) cannot be blamed for feeling we are almost there, what with digital surveillance, extreme weather events, rising authoritarianism, and multiple unending wars. But as long as the wars are on the outside of our homes, being fought by crazy politicians and their armies in far-off places, it is still possible to shut them out when we turn off the news and go to bed.

In two novels that I read in quick succession, however, the doom is no longer impending; it is at the door. Coincidentally, both are set in Ireland, one in Dublin and the other close to it, and while they tell very different stories, in very different ways, what they share is the focus on the home and family.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch was the Booker Prize Winner for 2023, and is a story, told in almost breathless prose, about a woman’s struggle to keep her family together in the midst of a political-military crisis that plunges the nation into chaos.

Eilish Stack is a scientist, and her husband Larry is a trade unionist who comes under scrutiny as the government rapidly clamps down on dissent of any kind. One night, Larry is taken in for questioning by the Garda, and disappears. Soon after, the oldest of the four Stack children, just shy of draft eligibility, goes into hiding and eventually joins the rebels. In the weeks that follow, the family’s existence grows more and more desperate as Eilish must balance the care of her ageing father with that of her teething baby, while her two middle children, a teenage girl and a tween boy, swing between bewilderment and anger as they see their world fall apart. You see the city quickly transform into a war zone—dwindling provisions, firing in the street, more and more disappearances. Eilish’s sister tries to convince her to emigrate to Canada when she still can, but she is reluctant to leave hope behind, refusing to accept that disappearance is forever.

As the family hurtles from one terrible tragedy to another, Eilish is finally forced to make a difficult choice, yet one that thousands of displaced people continue to make, everyday—except, we realize with a shock, it is from different locations, in different directions. It could be Syria, or Sudan, or Somalia, but middle-class Dublin? That’s unexpected.

Lynch tells the story in an unending rush, almost entirely from Eilish’s perspective except for a short intervention early in the novel that interjects Larry’s voice, with few paragraph breaks and sentences that speed by, allowing the reading little time to catch a breath and take stock. Yet there are moments in the text that force re-reading and reflection, such as this one, when Eilish finds herself walking through the house, now depleted of husband and oldest son, wishing, wishing, that things could be different:

“Listening to the empty house, hearing the old voices upstairs and her mother calling them to dinner, their feet booming on the stairs, the fire in the stove ticking as though it spoke to tie like some deranged clock…thinking, time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what’s left.”

Lynch takes us into the places where people wait in the shadows of war, for things to end, for people to come back, and exposes the suffering and the gradual erosion of hope. Despite the novel’s success and the Booker, Prophet Song received mixed reviews both for its style and story. Even as the Booker jury commended the book as a “worthy winner that captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment”, one review noted that the absence of quotation marks and other helpful punctuation means that “following a conversation takes some detective work”. But I found that it is precisely this device that forces us into Eilish’s mind and share in her desperation and growing paranoia.

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting—also set in Ireland, by an Irish writer, and on the Booker shortlist for the same year—also stays in the domestic, excavating the unraveling of a family that loses big in the financial crash of 2008. The Barneses—Dickie and Imelda and their children, the sulky, brooding Cass and the earnest videogamer PJ—each construct their own demons and invite them to the party.

This brick of a novel (some 650 pages) follows each of them over the course of the downturn, looping back several decades to build the backstory of how Dickie and Imelda ended up together. Imelda, the “most beautiful girl in the four provinces” is to be married to Frank, Dickie’s dashing younger brother, but when Frank dies in a tragic motor accident, she and Dickie mistake their mutual grief to be compatibility, and in the face of her father’s fierce opposition, they marry. Sixteen years later, the marriage is slowly falling apart, just like Dickie’s business, which is helped along in its downfall by a thieving mechanic who spirits away catalytic converters and blackmails Dickie after seducing him.

It is in Cass’s and PJ’s narratives though that we can see all the dark forces of the contemporary world come together—anxiety about climate change, species and habitat loss, online stalking and grooming by pedophiles, social media addiction and its consequences—and the way in which these complicate adolescent lives. Cass drinks herself out of exam tensions, while PJ befriends a fellow gamer on the internet who promises to rescue him from his dysfunctional family. The fraught nature of friendship, the willful blindness of family, the deep-seated resentments of childhood that cast long shadows across adult life…all of these are perhaps familiar threads in fiction, but Murray plays them with humour without losing depth or sensitivity.

The mystery of the title reveals itself only towards the end of the novel, but the question arises early on—why are there no photographs of her parents at their wedding, wonders Cass. Dickie explains it is because Imelda was stung by a bee caught in the wedding veil, and had a swollen eye that she did not want captured on camera. Cass is satisfied with the explanation, but the reader would do well to continue wondering.

One doesn’t read to compare, but having read the “two Pauls” one after the other, it was hard not to consider them together. Two very different stories, and very different styles. Yet they seemed to be saying something resonant. Family is a strange thing; it can be the most intimate of connections, with a taken-for-grantedness that can survive through extreme crisis, as in Prophet Song. But it can also contain spaces of extreme loneliness and impenetrable silences that can devastate, as in Bee Sting.