In 1998, Richard Rorty voiced the fear that “populist governments are likely to overturn constitutional governments” and “fascism may be the American future” because of government’s failure to curtail the rise of economic inequality and insecurity. “At that point,” he predicted,
something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. (Achieving Our Country, pp. 89–90)
A quarter-century later, our predictive powers have been honed by that imagined strongman made flesh. We do not know exactly what our country will look like four years hence if this November we reinstall Donald Trump in the Oval Office rather than the prison cell he so richly deserves, but as Rorty reminds us, “In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly optimistic.”
New as this particular sort of horror is to the United States, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, avers that there is no new thing under the sun, and no country safe from its citizenry choosing to make it a hell on Earth.
Lacking any mention of real-life political parties or figures, Prophet Song’s present-day Ireland stands for any contemporary democracy that lets itself fall under the shadow of the real-world right-wing fascism currently obscuring democratic values across the globe. From its opening line, darkness pervades the novel both literally and figuratively (“This night-haunted feeling,” “the trees in their witless conspiracy are nodding to the dark,” “a feeling of darkness, a zone of shadow seeking increase”), an oppression that does not let up for the duration.
Our access point is Eilish, a microbiologist and mother of four we meet on page 1 when her doorstep is darkened by two detective inspectors from the shadowy Garda National Services Bureau (recently invested by an Emergency Powers Act — passed in response to a supposed “ongoing crisis facing the state” — with “supplemental provision and power [for the] maintenance of public order”) politely asking after her husband Larry, deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland. By chapter 2 Larry has been disappeared into the state apparat, and we accompany Eilish as the ground under her sinks ever more deeply into a totalitarian black hole. Eventually a resistance movement sparks a civil war, but no deliverance is waiting at the end of our journey.
An absence of quotation marks and paragraphs invests Lynch’s lucid and occasionally beautiful prose with a fitting claustrophobia, and he opts for clear-eyed concision over melodrama and voyeuristic lingering. Eilish’s intelligence, attentiveness, and empathy make her an ideal guide in this inferno, but there’s only so much data she can take in as she focuses on the struggle to get herself and her children through the increasingly trying days, weeks, months.
Unlike It Can’t Happen Here, Prophet Song basically ignores the machinations of the totalitarianism driving the novel’s events to concentrate on the experience of those being crushed under its boot-heel. Lynch spotlights the common people, people common to any fascist tragedy. The main character is Eilish, the guest stars her friends and family, the supporting players “the nameless who have brought the present into being” — coworkers, shopowners, military personnel, people sitting in traffic next to you with faces no more or less noteworthy than your own. Together they all reap the whirlwind. “I don’t see how free will is possible when you are caught up within such a monstrosity,” a friend vents to Eilish, “one thing leads to another thing until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do.”
As Eilish listens to the BBC, she is struck by the difference between factual reportage and the lived experience of such monstrosity:
The news comes on and she turns it off shaking with rage, thinking, this is not the news, this is not the news at all, the news is the civilian watching the soldier outside her home as he lolls on a sandbag playing with his phone, the news is the assault rifle resting against the sandbag, it is the soldier’s laughing mouth, it is the fast-food wrappers and coffee cups strewn about the asphalt, it is the retired couple from up the street who have decided that they want to go, the news is their quarrel on the driveway, it is the woman flapping her hands about what cannot be taken in the car, it is the husband who shuts his face to his wife, it is the black bag the woman holds in her arms like a child, it is what is inside the bag, the news is the entire contents of the car, it is the boot the man has to sit closed, the news is the driveway gated for the last time, the house dark at night, it is the traffic light stuck on red for a week before it goes dark, it is the car that will not be allowed through the checkpoint, […] it is the eldest son who does not call anymore because it’s too risky to call and nobody knows if he is dead or alive. […] History is the silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to get there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.
Near the end of the novel Eilish experiences an epiphany that “what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast into darkness, […] and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others”; and “the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore […].”
Fascism has predominated large-scale human relations for most of our history. And even when we come to be more creative and egalitarian in our forms of government, we tend to backslide and cede power to fascists of one sort or another. Twentieth-century Germany is our modern classic cautionary tale, within a single generation moving from a politics dominated by progressives and social democrats to Hitler’s Third Reich.
While George Santayana famously tells us that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” he neglects to consider those who do remember the past and intend to repeat it. Xi and Putin have regressed the humanitarian gains of their dominions by cribbing tactics from Mao and Stalin. So it goes.
Such backsliding is trickier in Western democracies, where less central control of the military and the flow of information gives us more of a fighting chance. But as Donald Trump and numerous other would-be/coming-to-be autocrats are showing us, call the right plays and we’ll give it away.
Prophet Song reminds us that it can happen here; it is happening here. “All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping,” Lynch writes, “and now the great waking begins.” The question we get to answer is: wake up now to what we’re doing, or wake up later to what we’ve done?
We have been warned.