Paul Lynch spent months writing 'wrong book' before Booker winner

2024 has been a good year for author Paul Lynch.

In November 2023, he won the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, only the fifth Irish writer to do so in over 50 years of the award.

Prophet Song re-imagines Ireland as a newly fascist state, with a secret police, and tells the story of how that impacts on the family of Eilish and Larry Stack.

Lynch says he spent six months writing what he calls 'the wrong book' before he started to write Prophet Song in 2018.

In an extract below, Paul Lynch discusses what was on his mind at that time.

I realised afterwards just what was brewing, because I had written an essay in early 2018 about some of the ideas I was thinking about – I had no idea that this was leading me into a novel.

2018 was such a fascinating period – and there was a sense of such general upheaval in the world. I had been reading, re-reading a book called Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse – it’s a book that I love very much – and poor Hesse, he gets such a hard time these days, people say he’s an author for teenagers – and I say that’s such nonsense – you need to go back and read him again and see what he’s trying to do because he’s chasing something much deeper than that.

But in this book Steppenwolf – which is a story about a very solitary man – he’s trying to decide how much life he should actually step into, how involved he should be in life. There’s a page in that book where Harry Haller is looking out at Germany in 1927 and he sees the unravelling, he sees the sense of political chaos, he sees the anti-semitism and the xenophobia – just how open everything was – and he said the next war is inevitable.

When you re-read the great books, you see what you missed the last time, you see how much you've changed, and you see how the book grows with you.

When I read that in my 20s, I remember thinking, Gosh, to be alive in that time seems to be such an extraordinary thing – because you know in the 90s when I read it, there was a lot going on but by comparison it was pretty sedate – we’d had decades of peace since WWII and the peace was holding. When I re-read it in 2018, I read that page again, and I got the chill and I thought, Oh my gosh, we’re there now! It’s different but we’re there now.

And this is the thing, first of all about what great literature can do because when you re-read a book – and you should always re-read great books – reading is really re-reading as far as I’m concerned – when you re-read the great books, you see what you missed the last time, you see how much you’ve changed, and you see how the book grows with you. But also a book can show you your own times, it can show you what’s changed, and this is the thing – the creep of change is so slow – it can be so incremental that you do not notice the temperature dial-up, until it’s too hot to jump out of the water.

So this is what I realised at the time – we’d had Trump, we’d had Brexit –– we’d had a huge surge of nationalism around Europe. It’s increased to an extraordinary degree ever since.

We’d had Syria – which had imploded – there were millions of refugees which was effectively the greatest refugee crisis since WWII – and there was a huge indifference to that crisis – there was a huge inability to truly introspect into the situation of these people – and I was quite taken by that.

Paul Lynch: Prophet Song, RTE Radio One, 27th Dec at 7pm, and 5th Jan at 7pm.