Prophet Song: Plausible Collapse
Watching it all fall apart
George Orwell’s 1984 is indisputably the most well-known and influential English-language novel imagining and detailing a future totalitarian state so oppressive it is able to control the thoughts and even the language of its subjects. Looking back on it decades after I first read it and with a foresight lens, it has two main deficiencies: first, it’s a well-realized world, but it’s not clear what could reasonably get us from our world to the world of Oceania depicted in the book; second, the book follows the experience of one man coming up against and being crushed by the state, but it doesn’t show the effect on the family1, making it hard to have the same kind of visceral and generational tug we get when we think about futures we want our children and grandchildren to inherit.
Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker Prize winner Prophet Song, about a family struggling through a near-future Ireland’s descent into fascism2, is wildly successful on these two counts, and is a haunting, tragic book. The prose is thick and poetic, much more The Light Pirate than Parable of the Talents3, with each run-on paragraph with not-usually-demarcated dialogue serving as a self-contained scene. A natural comparison here would be fellow Dubliner James Joyce, but Prophet Song is definitely much more accessible than Joyce4. In terms of artistry, there’s often a deep correspondence between details in a scene and the emotional tenor of the scene - for example, a moth trapped in a lamp during a police interrogation.
De-Civilization
The broad contours of the story are pretty simple. In response to some vaguely-described set of threats, the nation of Ireland has become a one-party police state5. At the beginning, the general mood is uncertainty - the awareness that the state could take arbitrary action against troublesome citizens, but also such a sense of entitlement to “normalcy” that makes it hard to imagine. The book chronicles the experiences and choices of Eilish Stack — scientist, wife, and mother of four — as the comforts of modern life and civilization are progressively stripped away and she tries to protect her family. Over nine increasingly tense/horrifying chapters, Eilish loses, roughly in order, her sense of civil freedom and civic vibrancy, her husband’s freedom, the ability to tell the truth to her children, the ability to stand up for her rights or seek information6, her sense of normalcy and the stability of civilization, freedom of travel, information about detained relatives, access to a stable supply of goods at stable prices, steady electricity and garbage service, access to the internet and foreign media, running water, physical safety, access to healthcare, and then her home and all her possessions. The remarkable foresight-adjacent effect of the story is to draw a straight line between the current state of any well-off person in Western countries to a refugee who has lost everything, and show how each step along that line is a perfectly plausible outcome of the structures and choices made at the prior step. All along the way, she has to make decisions for her family with huge consequences while lacking the information to make them well; foresight as a discipline attempts to arm us with a broader view of potential futures in order to reduce the likelihood that we end up unprepared for what has come, and unable to work for something better.
Other Themes
I noticed four secondary themes in the book that made me think of the foresight work I’ve been connected with. The first is how people in liberal democracies see fascism as a foreign idea, but domination and control are a pretty natural state of affairs — the book talks about it like rust in the pipes that might break loose one day and come out the tap7. When a shocking future arrives, it’s almost always a small extension or novel combination of existing factors that create the previously-unimagined circumstances. Good foresight practices exist precisely to imagine some of these possibilities ahead of time and reduce surprise.
The second relates to the name of the book; it’s an acknowledgement that the images of doom and destruction in Biblical prophecy haven’t come to pass globally, but pretty much every day they’re coming true in some corner of the world, for some group of people. One of the purposes of a robust scanning practice is finding the evidence of change happening somewhere else that might soon be relevant for you.
The third issue is about the grief that the process of moving into the future imposes on us. Even when we live in the best of circumstances, we can feel the deep gnawing entropy of the world and specifically the way the world, time, and normal developmental processes take away our children from us. This is the emotional side of futures and is an underdeveloped line of inquiry — I know Juli Rush is digging deep into this, but I don’t know much else that has been organized or published here.
The last theme is an exploration of why people stay, why we keep participating in the same patterns and behaviors even when we start to see the signs of shocking possible futures burning on the horizon, and we even start to smell the smoke and feel the heat on our faces. Much of this seems to just be our brains fighting to maintain the manufactured normalcy field as long as possible, convincing us that things will get back to normal soon, or to not feel embarrassed as the one person who overreacted, etc. But it’s also clear that the future is connected enough to the present, or continuous enough, that it’s hard to see exactly where it starts, and hard to uproot; for example, coastal Texas and Florida haven’t fallen into the ocean, and haven’t been declared uninhabitable, but insurance rates are climbing fast8, and everyone living there has schools, sports, churches, friendships, dentists, etc, that would be challenging to replace. As a result, we wait too long to accept and act on painful new realities.
Overall, reading Prophet Song was a deeply beautiful and unsettling experience, and wildly effective as a scenario exercise. I finished reading about a week ago, and there are scenes and ideas I keep thinking about day after day. I ended up buying the book because the wait list at the library was so long, so if you’re in town, ask me for my copy.
This is accounted for in the novel through an essentially monastic asceticism among members of the party, plus the normal police state paranoia destroying familial affection and trust, with the proletarian class doing all the reproduction.
I’m trying to be precise in my language here, by describing a totalitarian state centered around a party that pervades public life.
A typical sentence, describing looking out into the backyard at night: “How the dark without sound gathers the cherry trees.”
When I was reading Ulysses, I would not have penetrated the book at all without the help of an entire website dedicated to making it comprehensible. With Prophet Song, I think I looked up locations twice to help me situate the action, and I also googled the protagonist’s vehicle model.
One of the practical consequences of having this set in Ireland is that it becomes much more plausible and urban than something similar in the US like Civil War; we’re so spread out and with such a large military that it’s much more dramatic but less intimate.
An interesting corollary sits in the story’s negative space. Bureaucracy is almost universally hated for its inefficient, impersonal, and sometimes nonsensical nature. However, all the policies, forms, and regulations constitute a remarkable technology that allows everyone to be treated the same way regardless of irrelevant personal details, the demeanor of the civil servant, etc; it’s hard to imagine modern society without it. Of course, totalitarian regimes can also hijack the form and appearance of bureaucracy to administer arbitrary rule at scale.
Amazon’s excellent first season of The Man in the High Castle does the same thing, showing how fascism is, in many ways, a natural fit for the US of the 40s-60s.
Insurance being the industry most closely tied to reality as a business model.