by Paul Lynch

This is a speculative fiction novel, following the course of the establishment of a totalitarian government in 21^st century Ireland. The feeling of ominousness is very similar to 1984, although in this novel we descend into the oppression, rather than already being fully immersed in the authoritarian world that Orwell created. Lynch does well to carry this device of steady descent throughout the book as an ordinary family lose more and more of their liberty and dignity, until, like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, they have very little left to give.

The fact that I have made comparison to John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize winner shows that Profit Song is far from being a new story. There are a host of fictional (and non-fictional) accounts of oppressive regimes, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, and Hans Fallada’s Alone In Berlin, are a few that spring immediately to mind. There is no doubt that this is a good piece of literature but perhaps there is not enough originality (such as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) for this to work as speculative fiction when there is so much remarkable literature representing or closely based upon human experience already available.

“How quickly we could find ourselves nervously passing a checkpoint or dreading the whistle of bombshells in the night.”

This sense of unoriginality is extended further when the rebels fight back and the novel descends into civil war. Dublin becomes a war-zone with sand-bagged barriers and again, rather than looking at something from a fresh angle, this is just repetition of literature depicting Ireland’s own bloody history, as magnificently evoked in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry and the distressing brother against brother complexity of Sebastian Barry’s The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, and even the checkpoints at every major crossing are a reminder of the troubles in Belfast, as brought to oppressive life in Anna Burns’ more worthy Booker winner, Milkman.

 I did enjoy this book, though; it is well told with vivid characters and settings and there is genuine fear and dread in the prose, with the enticement of hope always just out of reach. The fear is mostly that of a mother, trying to keep her family safe. My main criticism is that this is a ‘What if this happened to us?’ novel, but this has already happened to us. The only problem is that those of us who it happened to, and those of us who are the children and grandchildren of those that lived in a world or a nation fighting tyranny are now fading away. There is a new generation that watch the news and see something that they think could never happen to them. Perhaps the author’s intended audience are those that need to be reminded of how quickly hard-fought democracy can be lost. How quickly we could find ourselves nervously passing a checkpoint or dreading the whistle of bombshells in the night.