Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song wins the 2023 Booker Prize – but the judges picked the wrong Paul

With three Pauls on a shortlist of six names, there was a decent chance one would triumph with the 2023 Booker Prize. As it turns out, it is Paul Lynch who can claim the bragging rights and the £50,000 prize pot for his hauntingly claustrophobic tale Prophet Song, published by Oneworld. The novel, about an imagined near-future dystopian Ireland that is heading towards tyranny, is undoubtedly a powerful book, but it’s a winning choice that jars. Picking favourite books is highly subjective, of course, but for me the outstanding novel on the shortlist was by another Irishman called Paul – Paul Murray’s tragicomic multi-voice family drama: The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton).

Although chair of 2023 judges Esi Edugyan, who has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was at pains to point out that any of the six could easily have won, in truth it was unlikely to have ever been either of the two debuts: Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane (Picador) or Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You (4th Estate), neither of which were special enough to win. Canadian Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (Granta Books) was also an outsider, and it was hard to see Paul Harding’s excellent This Other Eden (Hutchinson Heinemann), about a community of outcasts facing ethnic cleansing, winning over enough of the judges to take the prize.

Edugyan conceded that the final choice, after Saturday’s six-hour meeting with fellow judges actor Adjoa Andoh, poet Mary Jean Chan, literature professor James Shapiro and writer and Peep Show star Robert Webb, “wasn’t unanimous”. I can understand why Lynch’s book would have its supporters. Lynch spent four years writing the story of teacher and trade unionist Larry Stack, a husband and father who is arrested and imprisoned by repressive government forces as Ireland slides into totalitarianism. Larry’s sudden detention by the newly formed secret police acts as the catalyst for wife Eilish’s realisation that “the state they live in has become a monster”.

With scientist and mother of four Eilish as the novel’s protagonist, Lynch memorably explores the sensations of dread and fear, of not knowing where your relatives are as you try to make sense of the nightmare of a collapsing society. As Lynch puts it in the novel, Eilish “lies in the dark walking blind alleys of thought”, remorsefully assailed by thoughts of what it’s like to be at the mercy of unpredictable forces suddenly in charge of a volatile country.

Edugyan repeatedly used the words “visceral experience” to describe reading Prophet Song and it is true that there are genuine feats of language in the dense, lyrical monolithic paragraphs that bring to life Eilish’s encirclement by malevolent forces. Lynch described the book as, in part, an attempt at “radical empathy”, drawing the reader in slowly and immersing you, so that by the end you would feel Eilish’s problems for yourself. He achieves this. You feel the anguish of a mother desperately trying to shield her family.

Prophet Song is dystopian realism and although I’m sure the judges did not take their cue “in a direct fashion” (Edugyan’s words) from recent events in Dublin, there is no doubt that Prophet Song’s chances were not damaged by the current social and political anxieties. Lynch, who won the 2022 Gens de Mer Prize for his maritime novel Beyond the Sea, began writing this novel four years ago when events in Syria were more of a triggering factor. Given the increasingly worrying spread of right-wing populism and the atmospheric way that Lynch looks at the way misinformation and disinformation have led to a decline in trust in traditional sources of authority, I fear his novel will have long-term topicality.

What I have serious doubts about, however, are the claims that this Booker winner (the 56th since the prize’s inception in 1969) will “outlast this age” (Edugyan) or that people will still be reading it “in 50 years” (Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation). I loved a previous Paul Booker winner. In 1977, Paul Scott’s novel Staying On was so outstanding that then chairman of the judges, Philip Larkin, threatened to jump out of the window if it didn’t win. Scott wrote a superb tale about the end of empire, but I suspect it’s largely forgotten nearly half a century later. I’m not sure Lynch’s book won’t share the same long-term fate, however remarkable his gift for capturing the current claustrophobic nature of state violence and repression.

Booker judges face a tricky task with so many rich pickings to choose from, but I do wonder whether 2023’s choice is somewhat reminiscent of last year, when the sublime “traditional” storytelling small-town novel by Claire Keegan (Small Things Like These) lost out – unfairly in my opinion – to the more experimental and self-consciously ambitious “metaphysical thriller”, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka.

Perhaps, with 2023, it’s as simple as acknowledging that, for me, Prophet Song, however hypnotic, simply did not cast its spell in the way that the more readable The Bee Sting did. For practical reasons, the Booker winner’s ceremony this year comes later than usual, on the very doorstep of Advent. Prophet Song will get a Christmas spike in sales, but if you’re looking for an entertaining, thought-provoking festive gift, I would recommend making a beeline for Murray’s magnificent, multi-layered story, even if it doesn’t have a “Booker winner” sticker attached to its cover.