The details of how and why this situation has arisen are sketchy. There are some vague early references to a “big lie” and an apparently spurious emergency declaration,but the novel never really explains who is in power or why they are doing what they are doing. Though it is set in a version of the near-present (characters have mobile phones and internet connections),it makes little attempt to address,let alone capture,the peculiar tenor of the anti-democratic forces that have convulsed democracies around the globe over the last decade or so.
In the early stages of the novel,there is no strong sense of the normalised chaos of demagogic populism,conspiracy theories,disinformation and nativist hysteria,more of a puzzled awareness that something has gone terribly wrong. One of the few hints at the ideological agenda of the “regime” is at the very beginning when Larry,husband of the protagonist Eilish Stark,disappears into indefinite detention,having been arrested for his activities as a trade unionist.
The effect of this indistinctness is to give the dystopian premise an abstracted formality.Prophet Song takes as its backdrop a generic authoritarianism,monolithic and anonymous,that seems to have been imposed on a supine society.
The novel presents its nondescript political context from the harried perspective of Eilish as she deals with the inertia of domesticity. Though she is naturally concerned about the fate of her missing husband,she still has to feed the baby,get the kids to school on time,and look after her increasingly senile father. She strives to fulfil these familial responsibilities even as the situation worsens,the nation tips into civil war,and the streets outside her Dublin home become a battleground.
The collision between kitchen-sink realism and political dystopia is the thematic key toProphet Song. There are numerous references to the sanctuary of the home being invaded by unwelcome forces and many moments of contemplative gazing out the window at the gathering darkness. As the novel unfolds,the naive notion that the domestic realm might be quarantined from the disruptive violence of the wider world is inexorably broken down.
On a broad conceptual level,then,Prophet Song is relatively straightforward. Lynch wants to suggest that the sense of security many people take for granted is a fragile illusion. He is less concerned with the reasons a society might run off the rails than the inevitably tragic consequences when it does. A great deal thus depends on his ability to dramatise the escalating sense of tension and the disintegration of old certainties,which he does somewhat unevenly,particularly in the first half of the novel.