The six finalists for the 2023 Booker Prize Photo: The Booker Prize
Paul Lynch's dystopian novel of a family trying to survive as Ireland descends into Civil War has won the Booker literary prize at an event in London.
Prophet Song had been the bookmakers' favourite and many critics' pick for some weeks now.
It follows a family, headed by the mother Eilish, who must make increasingly difficult decisions to survive the war. It is filled with extraordinary scenes and poetic writing, without paragraph breaks so the words become close and hypnotic.
When it was shortlisted for the Booker, which bills itself as "the leading literary award in the English-speaking world", the judges said then: "It is a shocking, at times tender novel that is not soon forgotten. Propulsive and unsparing, it flinches away from nothing. This is an utterly brave performance by an author at the peak of his powers, and it is terribly moving."
Book jacket image of Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Photo: Supplied
Judging panel chairwoman Esi Edugyan said they had been looking for a book which startled people and that "shakes us from our complacency".
She told a literary event in London that the jury sought a book which "spoke to the immediate moment and these troubled times ... but that reminded us that all of this is worth saving."
Meanwhile, it has been revealed by The Guardian that the jury was split on the winner and deliberated for hours before awarding it to Paul Lynch. In an interview, Edugyan said the jury "wasn't unanimous" and had to settle the winner by hours of discussion and multiple rounds of voting lasting about "six hours" on Saturday.
The novel, while set in Ireland, had echoes of war and refugees from troubled areas around the world.
Lynch took the stage and immediately quipped "there goes my anonymity".
It was not an easy book to write, he said. He wanted readers to understand totalitarianism by mixing the dystopian story with intense realism of the writing.
"I wanted to deepen the reader's immersion to such a degree that by the end of the book, they would not just know, but feel this problem for themselves," Lynch said in comments published on the Booker Prize website.
Lynch told the crowd novelists needed to be free to be "counter-factual" and explore stories of war and hurt.
He said that when he was fifteen he read The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 19th Century novel by British writer Thomas Hardy.
"I sat down and cried. I've been chasing that hit ever since."
He is now the fifth Irish author to win the Booker; the others include Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright.
Lynch was presented with the award moments after listening to speaker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was released from prison in Tehran last year, and described the ways in which books had saved her when she was in solitary confinement.
"When the guard opened the door and handed over the books to me, I felt liberated; I could read books, they could take me to another world, and that could transform my life," she said.
An RNZ reviewer, who previewed the six novels in the running for the award, said Prophet Song was timely because of its insights into desperate families in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and Israel.
It made the NZ Listener's list of top novels of the year.
There was always going to be a new winner this year with no authors who had won before being shortlisted by the judges; two books were debuts and the novelists were from Ireland, Britain, Canada and the USA. Lynch was one of "three Pauls" considered likely winners, alongside Paul Murray for his funny, tragic story of an Irish family imploding, The Bee Sting and Paul Harding, for This Other Eden, about the inhabitants of a small island off the coast of the US being swept away by the currents of racism.
Others shortlisted were debuts by Chetna Maroo, for Western Lane, a gentle study of grief, and Paul Escoffery for If I Survive You, linked stories of a Jamaican immigrant family in Florida. Sarah Bernstein's Study for Obedience, a fable-like story of obedience, rounded out the six shortlisted novels.
Lynch joins the likes of Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, J M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Hilary Mantel, Michael Ondaatje, John Banville and others as winners of the Booker in its 54-year-history.
He picks up £50,000 (NZ$100,000) and inevitably higher book sales, invitations to literary festivals around the world and a degree of fame.
Review by Jeremy Rees
Prophet Song is the story of a woman, Eilish, trying to hold her family together as Ireland slips inexorably towards violence. First the far-right government enacts emergency powers, then it crushes any dissent, until finally, a civil war breaks out. Eilish's husband Larry, a teacher and trade unionist, is seized at a protest rally and disappears. Her oldest boy joins the rebels and, he too, disappears.
There are so many strengths to this book. The first half is filled with dread as Eilish reacts to the state crackdown. When she stays seated at a family wedding, rather than join in the lusty singing of the national anthem, we know this is going to be bad, and it is. The family is tracked by the police; her local butcher won't serve her; she is shunned at work. When civil war breaks out, every decision becomes fraught. Running across a no man's land to see her son in hospital, Eilish realises every decision could be wrong when a sniper is tracking her; whether to run, zigzag, or drop to the ground. As war closes in, so do her choices; should Eilish get her family out or stay to search for her disappeared men.
There are extraordinary scenes, like the description of a bomb hitting the family home. In another, Eilish must go through a morgue, unzipping body bags to know if her boy is dead. "This is not my son. This is not my son. This is..."
The writing is strong, poetic but also told without any direct speech or paragraph breaks. Everything is filtered through Eilish, so the novel becomes claustrophobic. Eilish is trapped, and we are trapped in her consciousness.
If there is a weakness, there seem to be too many dream sequences, too many times Eilish wakes up dazed from a dream.
But what lifted Prophet Song into Booker contention is the final scenes. Descriptions of Ireland, even names and descriptions of characters, seem to leach away, until it becomes about any war; Eilish and her family could be from Lebanon, Syria or, now, Gaza. It is a timeless, timely book.
