Paul Lynch's long foray to reach the light

“The Booker is the biggest book prize in the world, that is just a fact. I can measure it now — my agent is afraid to show me his inbox.”

Lynch is still in London when we talk, on a whirl of press engagements and interviews but it’s a measure of the man that he answers every question graciously and thoughtfully. His previous life as a journalist and sub-editor means he has some insight into the process, although he still finds it hard to believe that he is headline news.

“It is not something I ever thought would happen. It probably gives me a little bit of an edge that I understand how it is from the other side.”

The irony, of course, is that Prophet Song itself presciently taps into the current news cycle, with a frighteningly realistic portrayal of an Ireland sliding towards civil war and totalitarianism.

The news of Lynch’s win was celebrated online with genuine goodwill, a much-needed boost for a country at a low ebb on many fronts. He says the overwhelmingly positive reaction reflects how literature is so deeply embedded in our culture and psyche.

“It seems to me that there is a reason why people respond in particular to an Irish person winning the Booker Prize — it’s because literature is central to Irish culture. When writers and artists are listened to, that is a sign of a culture that is self-aware,” he says.

The win was made even more gratifying by the fact that Lynch has faced numerous personal challenges in the last few years, including long covid and kidney cancer, from which he has now thankfully recovered.

On a professional level, it hasn’t always been an easy path either. Lynch’s debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, was critically acclaimed when it was published in 2013 but he struggled to keep up the momentum with the publication of the follow-up, The Black Snow, and he couldn’t find a publisher for his third book, Grace. He pays tribute to his agent Simon Trewin for the turnaround.

“Simon took me on at a time when my publishing career was not easy, when I wasn’t selling many books in Ireland at all. I had reached a point where it was hard to publish me in London. Simon read Grace and basically said ‘I want to save your career’.

“He took me on and it took him 14 months to find a publisher for Grace, nobody would touch it. Then a year later, it won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.”

Prophet Song is published by a small independent, Oneworld, led by Juliet Mabey and her husband, Novin Doostdar, also responsible for publishing previous Booker winners Marlon James and Paul Beatty.

Lynch says:

Juliet has extraordinary energy and commitment to publishing books that aren’t necessarily commercial….in 14 years, she has won the Booker three times, it is incredible. 

"I have to acknowledge these people who have been there for me and allowed me the privilege of writing books and seeing them being published,”

Lynch admitted to having a ‘wobble’ at the ceremony, leaving the room before the winner was announced. He says the enormity of the situation got to him but Ben Okri, who won the prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, came to the rescue. 

“He sensed something was wrong with me and came up to me and just said the right words and I was able to go back in the room and sit down. It was more the fear of winning, of what it would do to me and how it would change things. I can see the magnitude of it now. It has changed everything utterly for me, there is no doubt about it,” he says.

While it has been hectic since the win, Lynch’s regular meditation practice and his interest in Stoic philosophy has meant no more wobbles. Does he feel more Zen about it all now?

“Yeah, I do actually. There’s a line from Seamus Heaney’s North: “Expect Aurora Borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light.”

“You know, these things come along maybe once in your career and the only way to meet it is with gratitude and the understanding that this moment too shall pass.

“I am aware of what it means back home and that there is a responsibility that comes with that too.”

One of the recurring questions faced by Lynch is about the political themes of Prophet Song: it won the Booker the same week that Dublin was aflame, giving an all too real glimpse of what societal breakdown looks like on the very streets he wrote about. 

Does such discussion take away from what he was intending to convey in the book?

“ Prophet Song is a work of fiction. It is not intended as a warning. There are so many layers to this book but that is there for the taking if you want to take it. And it seems to me that it doesn’t require a huge leap of imagination to join the dots from what we saw last Thursday night to the opening chapter of this book. The question is what are we going to do about it,” he says.

The protagonist of Prophet Song is Eilish Stack, a scientist and mother of four trying to save her family as her trade unionist husband disappears and rebel forces fight a tyrannical government.

Her father has dementia, while her sister in Canada begs her to leave Ireland. Lynch captures the impossibility of her situation with heartbreaking acuity — also conveying how easily the refugees that we see as ‘them’ could one day be ‘us’.

“There is the line where her sister says ‘history is a silent record of those who did not know when to leave’. And we all do that, we all look back at extraordinary moments of collapse in history and we say ‘well, I would have gotten out, I would have known when to go’.

“As a novelist, I really doubt that. And that is what I am exploring in this book — leaving is actually the hardest thing in the world to do.

“One of the ways of articulating that was to really dig down into the banality of Eilish’s life — being a parent, taking her kid to creche, bringing her dad to the hospital. At the same time, she’s truly a Greek heroine. She is battling these extraordinary forces that are beyond her comprehension. And yet she is an ordinary person. That was really fundamental to me,” says Lynch.

Having experienced serious health issues, Lynch appreciates his good fortune even more. Does he feel that with the Booker win, the universe is somehow trying to make it up to him?

“The universal trickster has definitely been at work in my life, there is no doubt about that. But one should not tempt again the universal trickster by making any assertions about their work,” he says.

Happily, he says he has never felt so well, a good thing given the demands of recent days.

“I have my energy back, I have never felt better, it is extraordinary. My publicists — I have a few of them now — were marvelling at how I could get through Monday and Tuesday. I had the energy for it and it is a blessing.”