In July 2023 I was house sitting for a family member and the first thing I noticed was there were no books in the house. Then one afternoon while searching for an iron I found, on the bottom shelf of the linen closet, a pile of five books, four Agatha Christie novels, and one novel by an unknown writer. What caught my attention was one of the endorsements on the front cover of this unknown title was by my all-time favourite novelist, the Irishman Colm Tóibín. Being a fan of, and I thought knowledgeable about, Irish literature I was embarrassed not to know the novel, Red Sky at Morning (2013) nor the author, Paul Lynch. I read several pages, at first wary of the poetic language but awed by the ease of understanding, the tension of, and immediate involvement in, the story. I planned to steal it, but didn’t, wished now I had, and will next time I’m in that house.
The plot is simple: a dystopian society on the edge of collapse and a deeply moving story of a mother’s fight to hold her family together. That’s on the back cover so I’m not spoiling it for you.
The language is sometimes poetic:
How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whisper. Tired now, the day almost behind her, all that still that
And the size and design of the font is surprising clear and easy on the eye: it is very neat and black. Recently some publishers have been printing in grey, to save money I assume, which I find annoying.
But what most readers will be talking about is the punctuation, or lack of it. In this book, Lynch does not punctuate dialogue. This renders each page a justified, on left and right, slab of text. It can, on first glance, look daunting.
She lifts two mugs and peers inside them, squeaks her finger around the rim. Dad, look at these mugs, why don’t you use the dishwasher, you really need to wear your glasses when washing up. Simon does not lift his eyes from the newspaper. I’m wearing my glasses right now, he says. But you need to wear them while washing up, these mugs are ringed with tea. You can blame the useless cleaning lady …
If you realise that you do not understand what you have just read, read the line again, read the paragraph again. Listen to your own reading voice. I had to do this initially. Just like turning to Dickens or Woolf, you need to get used to the different tone, the different syntax, and in this case, the different sentence structure. There’s a reason for this difference: Lynch’s fictional world is different; it’s falling apart. But, go with it. When you listen to an audio book the reader doesn’t ‘read’ the punctuation yet the listener understands perfectly who says what. Read like a listener and you will be rewarded.
Lynch burst onto the literary scene in triumph (more personal embarrassment – why didn’t I know?) when his first novel, that one I found next to the iron among the pile of Agatha Christies, was the prize of a six-publisher auction in London, and it won him acclaim abroad, especially in France where it was a finalist for France’s Best Foreign Book Award: Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. He’s written three novels since. Prophet Song is his fifth.
It’s a unique book and a remarkable feat of imagination worth getting stuck into.
Here is a succinct Q&A video by Paul Lynch, on the Booker short list, before the announcement of the prize winner.
You can buy the book here, in various formats.
Michael K Freundt 