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Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. Born in 1977, he grew up in Malin Head, the northernmost point of the Irish coast. His latest novel, A prophetic song, paints a nightmare vision of Ireland’s slide into an authoritarian regime. Written in long, poetic sentences—no punctuation and few paragraph breaks—the novel draws the reader into the claustrophobic world of a city under siege. Described by Lit Hub as “a 300-page panic attack,” A prophetic song, just published in paperback, won the Booker Prize last year. Lynch has been compared to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner.
How did it go from you won the Booker?
I no longer measure time in weeks and months. I measure it with interviews. I passed the 100 mark at Christmas. Now I’m about 170. It still seems amazing, miraculous even, that Booker Prize came to me, although my eight-year-old daughter is not impressed. She recently announced: “I’m sick of people stopping you on the street and saying ‘congrats.’ The contempt with which he said that word would have stripped the skin.
A year ago on the day you found out you were shortlisted for the Booker, you were on the operating table after being diagnosed with cancer. Your son was born in 2018 and your marriage recently ended. How would you describe the last few years for you?
There’s a picture of me taken seconds after winning the Booker. My editor Juliet Maby hugs me as my agent Simon Trevin jumps to his feet and claps. But I have my hands on my face. This is the picture of a man who can no longer perceive reality, who was diagnosed with cancer and major surgery 15 months ago, and who saw the end of his marriage unexpectedly while he was recovering. Ten seconds after this photo was taken, I was on my feet and welcoming the moment. I was lucky enough to receive preventive immunotherapy and was told that the disease was very unlikely to recur. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be getting on with the rest of my life.
For many months you worked on the “wrong novel”. How did you change to get on track?
I was writing the wrong novel for about six months, just hammering away at granite and getting nowhere. And then one Friday afternoon I thought, “This isn’t a novel, I’m done.” The following Monday I calmly returned to my desk, not knowing what to do. I created a new document and waited. And then the home page of A prophetic song arrived and I knew it had juice, that ineffable substance you hope to find in your writing. In life, I’m a big fan of turning. If Satan, when cast out of heaven, had turned away, where could he have landed? I love this idea. We all need to deviate from time to time.
Reading the novel today, it is impossible not to recall the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict. But you started writing in the fall of 2018.
I was definitely trying to get a glimpse of modern chaos while writing this book, though I was hardly surprised to see Mariupol razed to the ground or Gaza pulverized. I have been told that I have written a novel in the zeitgeist, but to me it is a novel about what has been, continues to be, and will always be. Misery is built into the human condition. There is no biblical end of days. We’re destroying the world over and over and over and you’re watching it on the news.
There were four Irish writers on the Booker longlist last year. Although Irish fiction is always in a class of its own, it seems dominant now. Why?
Ireland is in the midst of a social revolution and this is having a profound effect on our art. While we once lived in the shadow of the cross, we are now cosmopolitan Europeans creating a post-Catholic society, exploring and re-identifying what it means to be Irish in a globalized world. Our art erupted with ferocious energy to meet this moment. A prophetic song it looks like a global novel to me, but it’s undeniably Irish.
Were you a good student?
When I was 12, a teacher punched me for a math assignment and it worked for me in school. In my fourth year of high school, my English teacher kicked me out of English placement. We didn’t get along and I thought he was a fool. I sat in English for a few weeks and then found myself recovered. My mother told me years later that some teachers were horrified and went to the principal with my parents. How lucky I am for that. The writers I absorbed over the next two years – Hardy, Eliot, Shakespeare, Manley Hopkins – entered my DNA and made me who I am.
Are you back in your writing shed yet?
I mumble something on days when I don’t have interviews or travel, but I actually have so little bandwidth. When you win the Booker, they tell you you can’t write for a year. I met several recent winners along the way, each of whom confided in me that it could take much longer than that. The impact on the psyche of winning an award of this magnitude is not to be underestimated.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
I spend a strange time in supermarkets. I cook a lot and tend to make most meals from scratch. There really should be a limit to how many times a week one can go into Lidl. When I have free time or don’t have kids, I play jazz records, watch classic movies, read and mumble. I tend not to watch TV. That latest show you want to discuss on your favorite streamer? I’m sorry, but mostly I have no idea, even though I’m a fan of The bear.
You described yours worldseen as tragic. Do you feel there is hope for us??
Dostoevsky wanted to understand how human there is in man. I consider this my project. All five of my books belong to the tragic worldview. In other words, they are unashamedly metaphysical and concerned with the inevitability of suffering and loss in our impermanent world. Such concepts may sound strange, but it would be good to think about them in our mindless modern moment. The Oedipus play and King Lear suffers for good reason.
Tell us a joke.
A woodpecker walks into a bar, sits down and says, “Excuse me, is the bartender here?”
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