It is great to be active again writing for the Glasgow Review of Books. I began contributing periodic book reviews and the occasional short story to the GRB in 2014. During and, for a time, after the pandemic, the Review went on hiatus. It has, however, returned stronger than ever with reviews of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, author interviews and other interesting literary fare.
My first contribution since the GRB‘s hiatus ended was a review of Paul Lynch’s harrowing, 2023 Booker Prize winning novel, Prophet Song. What a choice assignment! I cannot recommend Lynch’s brilliant writing too highly.
Prophet Song, though a work of fiction, has much to tell readers about the risks that western democracies face at the hands of populist, hard right politicians should they ever gain power. It imagines an Ireland in the near future that has, unwittingly, elected such a party to government without any real appreciation of the dangers that that government posed. As I said in my review:
In Prophet Song, through the enactment of a draconian Emergency Powers Act, the National Alliance has suspended the Irish constitution. Government operatives, with the support of the Irish armed forces and the Garda National Services Board (the ‘GNSB’) – a new emanation of the Garda Síochána – have infiltrated public and private institutions, displaced democratic norms and processes and curtailed freedoms at every turn. Officials, colleagues, friends and neighbours have been co-opted, sometimes openly and sometimes covertly. Suspicions abound. Curtains twitch. All semblance of normal living is gradually unseated.
Prophet Song is ominously compelling fiction that is both timely and topical. Threats to democratic norms are increasingly visible in western nations where, 20 years ago, they would have been unthinkable. Truly “the novel for our times,” Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song makes frighteningly concrete a future that could actually materialise should citizens fail to be properly vigilant and permit their democratic freedoms to slip between their fingers.
You can read my review of Prophet Song here.
