The universal trickster has been at work on my life in all sorts of wild ways, Irish novelist Paul Lynch tells me the morning after he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, which imagines Ireland taken over by a fascist regime.
Before beginning the novel, Lynch had spent months writing the wrong book. Then, one Friday afternoon, he realised it was dead. The following Monday he sat in his shed at the bottom of his garden in Dublin, opened a new Word document and the first page of Prophet Song came to him almost as it appears in the novel.
That opening page begins with a knock on the door on a suburban Dublin street. Two members of the newly formed Irish secret police are looking for Eilish Stack's husband, Larry, a leader of the teaching trade union. From that first line to the devastating final pages, we are dragged into Eilish's world as first her husband and then her eldest son are disappeared. Creeping surveillance, the erosion of civil liberties, curfews and censorship grow into all-out civil war.
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