(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)

What is the lived experience of totalitarianism? We get a peek in Irish author Paul Lynch's 2023 Booker-winning novel Prophet Song. Fear, helplessness, an overpowering grimness - a reader is transported into a world where fear is so internalised that it almost becomes a way of life. Ahead of his appearance at the Sharjah International Book Fair, Lynch told City Times what it is like to live with the characters and themes long
after they have been immortalised on the pages of a book. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Your novel Prophet Song revolves around how authoritarianism seeps into everyday lives. What had inspired you to write it in the first place?

When I began to write this book, I was thinking about our modern chaos. How western liberal democracies are no longer as stable as we once presumed. How so many countries in Europe have seen a lurch to the political right. And I thought too about our response to the plight of Syrian refugees flooding into Europe, and the various humanitarian crises that have been occurring around the world and how this will only grow with climate change. I wanted to know, perhaps, where all this might lead us. Prophet Song is a book that also seeks to articulate our modern terror in a way that Beckett, or Kafka, did in their own time.

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Your work has centred on the Irish context predominantly. Where does literature from Ireland stand in the context of world literature?

Irish fiction has its fair share of literary masters, and in the English language, we hold a central place in world literature. Writers such as Yeats, Joyce and Beckett inescapably changed the language and the form. How blessed - and cursed - are we as writers to be coming in the wake of such giants. If we have a secret power, I suspect it comes from the fact that English is not our historical language but we have sought to make it our own. We were colonised by the English and in turn, we colonised the English language. The clash of English with the different grammatical form of the Irish language gave it new colour and shape.

In politically charged times, what should the role of a writer entail?

I can only speak as a fiction writer and as I see it, the role of serious fiction is to frame the questions accurately. The novel exists not to fix the world but to witness it. The human stage is one of astonishing contradiction. We live as human beings with the belief that we are fully rational beings. But we have a deep evolutionary inheritance and remain deeply irrational. Every one of us contains within both the abyss and the divine. Under the right conditions we will open the abyss and that way lies oppression, slaughter, war crimes and genocide.

And yet we aspire to the better angels of our nature. Civilisation is the ideal but of course, tribalism remains the instinct. And so we destroy and we create. We oppress and we give shelter. And we live with the rational and the irrational doing daily battle inside of us. This is what makes the human being a tragic figure and why literature is necessary. Every person is a universe of feeling and possibility and literature is fundamentally about this problem. How are we to recognise the problem of suffering and the fundamental aliveness of other people? Literature centres us around that problem.

How has your background in film criticism shaped how you visualise your narratives?

My imagination is intensely visual and I often write as though I am watching a film. In my time as a newspaper film critic - I reviewed over 1,000 films - I absorbed a lot about narrative and storytelling. Even the most enigmatic, elliptical films have a story to tell and that is a discipline I brought to my fiction. In the literary universe there is a corner of writers who believe that in order to be a serious novelist, and to express our true alienation, you must jettison any notion of storytelling.

Such notions are bizarre. The truly great novelist - the complete novelist - is the writer who can bring to bear the weight of the universe within the simplicity of an unfolding story. To get a story right, to make it true, requires great labour and skill and I harbour a suspicion that the writers most wary of narrative are those least able to tell a story.

There is a kind of silence in Prophet Song . How do you use silence as a narrative device?

I consider silence to belong to the problem of the unknown. When you think about it, reality is all that we don't and cannot know. My fiction contains the unsaid, the unspeakable, the unheard and the unknown. I am interested in the problem of philosophical blindness - how we move through life acting in certainty but reaping always the unforeseen. We structure our reality out of belief but the truth is we know so very little. It is the role of fiction to somehow let the reader hear this silence and comfort our unknowing. What lies unseen or beyond our comprehension belongs to the philosophical idea of the Sublime and therein lies our feelings of terror.

You have spoken about rewriting your own books. How do you know when a novel has actually finished?

This is difficult to explain but you know when you know. There is a philosophical idea called the principle of sufficient reason. Everything in the right place for the right reason. I lean into that. Everything in a novel must associate around meaning and so I am distilling always to what is essential. But also, as Virginia Woolf once said, style is rhythm and so I spend a lot of time perfecting the rhythm of my fiction. Within the rhythm lies meaning - the feeling of a life unfolding.

Fear, you have said, was an important aspect of writing Prophet Song . How do you write about fear in a manner that does not intimidate the reader?

I'm not interested in fear or darkness for its own sake. I am drawn to nightmares or troubling landscapes because the nightmare is not fiction. Prophet Song seeks to recognise something essential about human experience - to reveal some truth about what it means to be alive in this forsaken world. Again and again, I find myself returning to one question: how much human being is in a human being?

In Prophet Song, I wasn't interested in collapse as a spectacle. I wanted the novel to feel hyper-real, to bring the reader into a deep sense of the real and the terror within it, so we might experience a kind of radical empathy with Eilish Stack and grasp the personal, human cost of events. This is not political writing but existential. And this takes the reader deep into a place of terror and fear. Every sentence in the book comes from a place of truth. And the reader I hope learns to trust that truth and find it necessary. In a certain way, fiction can act as Medusa's mirror, allowing us to stare at Medusa without turning to stone.

What does winning a Booker change for the writer within?

I can't say that it has changed me much within. When I sit down to write a book and stare at that empty page I feel just as helpless as when I was a beginner writer. That will never change. But the validation of my work has been an important boon. The fundamental problem of winning the
Booker is that it pulls you away from the work. I've been speaking about Prophet Song for two and a half years. That's a long time for any writer to be pulled away from the desk. Thankfully I am now, mostly, back at work on a new novel.

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