"Prophet Song" by Paul Lynch

An audio book.

Ireland is under emergency powers. Eilish (a biochemist) and Larry Stack (a trade-unionist) have 4 children. Larry's arrested for anti-state activities (organising a strike). Simon, the senile, widowed father of Eilish, suggests that she takes the kids to Canada - Eilish’s sister Áine lives there. But there's a problem with passports. The eldest son, Mark (17) is told to go into National Service. Children are arrested, tortured, then their bodies returned. There's a protest march - 50,000 people maybe. Eilish is worried about Mark - he's late and she's expecting an army reaction

I'm 25% through the book and I'm not interested yet. But now the style becomes more lyrical and dreamy as she worries. She observes more carefully, and the language matches her more dreamt states - "happiness hides in the humdrum", "something is being whispered into the afternoon", noise blooms into sleep", "the lacework of shattered glass", "watching the bird absolute in its movement", "adrift on her anguish", etc

There's a curfew. Eilish suggests that she and Mark use burner phones. Eilish suggests that he leave home after his name (as a national service evader) and address are in the paper. She's side-lined at work. Her father's gone missing. Bailey (12) is wetting his bed. He seems to miss Mark more than his father. The house is vandalised. Rebels start a civil war. The city's bombarded. Bailey gets schrapnel in his skull. She has to leave him in a hospital overnight. Next day, having negotiated check-points and sniper fire she finds that he's been transferred to a military hospital. Once there, she's told to check the morgue. He died of a heart attack.

Her sister's managed to get money to her and is trying to deal with documentation. Eilish tries to get over the border with her remaining children, paying more money to smugglers. The book ends with her on a flotilla of little boats.

The father's dementia plus the state's decay seem unstoppable and predictable. I'm never very interested reading about battles with bureaucracy.

Other reviews

• Aimée Walsh (Told without paragraph breaks, the book has a breathless, claustrophobic atmosphere. Free will and the meaning of liberty are pushed beyond their limits, eroding both to a state of near non-existence)
• Dorothy Yaqub (Reactions were mixed; some critics loved the novel, while others disparaged it as the weakest finalist. ... The novel’s greatest strengths are its pacing and world-building. ... Much of the criticism the novel has received is directed at its unconventional style. There are no paragraph breaks, and the dialogue is not distinguished with quotation marks. ... My own critiques of Prophet Song primarily concern its ending. After nearly 300 pages of slow burn, the last 50 pages feel rushed by comparison)
• Melissa Harrison (Lynch is not the first male novelist to be influenced by Cormac McCarthy, and he won’t be the last; ... The influence manifests as heightened, sometimes biblical language, syntax and imagery, nouns and adjectives pressed into service as verbs (Eilish “coins free” a supermarket trolley; is “suddened into” a dark room), some extremely long sentences, and an aversion to semicolons)