What was it, a week ago or so that the so-called US President threatened the overnight annihilation of Iran, the destruction of the oldest civilisation on the planet by the youngest? For the first time in a few decades, half the world went to bed wondering if they’d wake up to the news of a nuclear attack. Had the president and his big-shoed sycophants actually pushed through with their threat, apocalypse, holocaust and the end of the world would have come to Iran on a dreadful scale not seen since Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end World War II. A man so childishly in love with the superlative (the biggest, the best, the worst ever) should not be given the codes to the most powerful weapons on the planet. Perhaps that should be a constitutional ammendment. But lest we forget that, even without the use of nuclear weapons, America and Israel (as states) have killed thousands this past month, kicking off on the first night of the bombing with the destruction of a school that killed 120 children, a war crime that, no doubt, brought something akin to the end of the world to the Shahrak-e Al-Mahdi neighbourhood in Minab, Iran.
In fact, every time a bomb is dropped on a civilian settlement (whether target or collateral), someone’s world is coming to an end: one family’s, one street’s, one town’s. And yet, astonishingly, aerial bombing is still the first recourse of most governments when the need or (in the case of the US and Israel) desire arises — the incredible, hubristic narcissism that somehow leads them to believe they have the right to end the worlds of innocent people and give their crime a Hollywood name: Epic Fury this time round (a code name that Hegseth almost drools over, every time he says it). It is truly unfathomable, and this is the climactic premise, in one sense, of Paul Lynch’s brutal and brilliant Prophet Song, which explores the piecemeal apocalypse of an imagined slide into civil war in Ireland through the experiences of a mother whose family is torn apart.
Chillingly, as family members disappear and the sounds of gunfire and bombs draw closer, Eilish’s sister Áine tells her on the phone that “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.” It’s one of many powerful moments in the novel when the reader is forced to look inward and ask themself, would I know when to leave, and perhaps the even harder question, would I be able to leave? The incomprehensibility of the situation and the all-too-human hope that things will just somehow return to nomal are the factors that stop Eilish from leaving until it is arguably too late, these and the unbearable ideas that those people taken might return to an empty home, or those left behind will be swallowed without trace in the destruction.
What’s terrifying about Lynch’s novel is the all too believable universality of the story. So claustraphobically consumed are we at times in Eilish’s nightmare, that it is only when we zoom out a little, or rather, when Lynch does this for us, that we are jarred into the understanding that the fiction we are reading is the fact for someone somewhere, and has been so for centuries and centuries, for as long as war itself has existed. Looking out from the window of a derelict warehouse full of refugees from the fighting, Eilish has the epiphany that,
“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, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place or another and that 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, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”
Essentially, Lynch’s novel is a indeed a “warning.” Viewing the end of the world as a local possibility in his own country of Ireland is a stark warning to all of us that if the wrong people are handed the levers of power, as Americans, Israelis, Iranians and Lebanese among others are surely realising, then the repeated historical truth of the Prophet’s Song may not always be such a “distant” one.
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