It's a funny thing when a book that's enjoying widespread success is also an emotional health hazard. You can't help but watch other readers as they make their way through it, keeping an eye on them to see where they are in relation to its various lacerating moments. It happened a few years ago with Hanya Yanagahar as a Little Life, countless readers sharing in a kind of collective trauma, and it happened again with last year's Book A Prize winner,
Paul Lynch's Profit Song. I think I've quite literally let out a howl of grief at one point reading this book, kind of involuntary reaction that was very undignified on public transport.
You're not the first person I've met who has had a mile breakdown on public transport reading this book.
That it wasn't great.
I mean, that's your Profit Song is Lynch's fifth novel, and it's inducing mild breakdowns on public transport all around the world. It's the story of Alish Stack, whose union organizer husband, when the book opens, has been disappeared by the state. Lynch's fictional island slips into totalitarianism with the Certainties and civil liberties so many of us take for granted.
Likewise disappearing around, elish and throughout, she tries to hold together the normalcy of domestic life, raising three children and caring for a father with dementia, all the while keeping food on the table. The whole thing reads like a fever dream, upsetting and relentless. The book A Prize judges called Prophetsong a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave that captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment.
As unused bulletins are full of stories of war and displacement, of tragedy and loss. We sometimes turn to the books we love for escape or for distraction, But sometimes the opposite is true. As much as it might hurt, great literature can reckon with great horrors, with grief, an injustice. Prophetsong is one such book. I'm Michael Williams and this is Read This a show about the books we love and the stories behind them. This episode's an unusual one
for us. A read this departure. It's an edited recording of a live interview I did with Paul Lynch when he visited Australia for Sydney and Melbourne Writers' Festivals. The conversation you're about to hear is from our Melbourne event in front of a capacity crowd at the gorgeous Atheneum Theater. Backstage, Paul was relaxed and warm, but he was also a man who was ten months into a book tour that
had involved more than two hundred interviews. The machine behind the Booker Prize had been working him hard, making him think and talk about his book again and again in whole new ways with readers around the world, so that seemed like as good a place as any to start.
Well, the book is surprised that you know, ninety percent of writers will admit to wanting to win it.
The other ten percent are lying, and it's just there.
It looms over you as a writer, and you think, oh, that'd be nice, but you don't expect it to come your way because so few were chosen. That's just the reality of a price like this, and if it comes your way, it changes your life. You find yourself on the stage before eight hundred people in Melbourne, marvelous. You know, I should be at home in Dublin, in my small house. So the Booker changes your life and I didn't see
it coming. And one of the reasons I didn't see it coming is that, well, the kind of fiction that I, at least that I thought I wrote was, you know, it's not designed for the center, shall we say, in the sense that there are writers who hit it down the center of the court, and that's great.
But I was always playing it to the edges.
Looking for the line, trying to find the line, trying to just the danger point.
That's what excites me.
But not always when you play it that far, are you going to get on the radar.
For the prizes?
But it happened that approach to writing is that typical of who you are as a human being, Like once you decided it was a rightly path for you, was the only way you were going to stay interested doing stuff that did feel like a challenge at all times.
Well, you say human beings.
So I mean, there's this citizen Paul, that guy, and he's quite normal.
He shops in.
The supermarkets quite a lot, he likes to cook, and.
You know, he deals with his kids and all that stuff.
But the writer is a different person. And the writer is a grumpy old person possibly late seventies, might be a lady actually I don't know, but absolutely implacable has a.
Vision and will not bend to that vision.
So there's something you know, it goes back to the Greeks. Actually, this this this idea.
Of the word daymonic, the daymon.
The Greeks called creativity, that the.
Daemon Socrates talked about.
When you were in communication with the gods, that you're these this thing that you were channeling down was the daymon And of course we know that's that's it's there is it's internally, but it's the subconscious. And as a writer, you learn to live in proximity to that. You open the door to it. And I called the door into the dock and you and you learn to channel this energy, this this voice from back there or maybe it's down down here somewhere. It's hard to know where it comes from,
but it's deeply authentic and it must be obeyed. And I have I've had a challenging career, you know, like after my second book.
The Black Snow, that book sold about four hundred.
Copies in in Ireland and the UK, and you know, at the same time it had sold enormously while in France, but like twenty thousand or something which is a really big number in translation, but in Ireland to the UK it was like four hundred. That means you're done and your career is effectively done at that point. And I thought I was finished and I couldn't get a publisher for my third book, and that's the dame on, that's the bloody it's you know, there's nothing I could do
about that. And fortunately I did get a publisher. But then I went and wrote Grace, another book that's completely implacable and unrelenting and makes no excuses for what it's doing.
And when you talk about that implacability, when you talk about that kind of finding a path and choosing a path and staying on it, I imagine that takes a certain certain degree of self belief. Do you remember the moment when you first said to someone unself consciously, oh, yes, I'm pulled inch, I'm a writer.
Gosh, I do actually, And I said it to my brother, who doesn't read very much at all, so he was just going to go, what, yeah, whatever, you know, why aren't you playing guitar with me in a band like we used to do?
And what had.
Happened was I had gone to Paris for two weeks, as one does when one is experimenting with writing. And I found the voice on the page the way I sound.
I remember hitting it and I just sat back and.
Went ooh, and I was so excited by it. I was writing Red Sky in the morning at the time, very early early stages. But that was the moment when I knew, I really knew that I was onto something.
Take me back for a moment to before then, to the kind of childhood, the kind of adolescent period in your life, and what books meant to you then, what your relationship was to being a reader ahead of being a writer.
You know, I'm lucky that I come from a family where reading was always a thin My mother was a stay home wife to bring us up, but she was a serious reader. She later became an adult literacy teacher, so she once we were old enough, she started teaching adult literacy. But I remember her teaching me to read it four or sitting on the floor in her house in Malnhead, which is the most northerly point in Ireland.
But I remember.
She's sitting on the floor with me and we're reading words off cereal packets that have been cut out, And that was the start of it, and then a teacher at primary school I think I was about eight, eight or nine, she handed me to it as an abridged copy.
I think it was The Prisoner of Zender Wow.
I remember thinking, I've been reading, I've been reading the wrong books until now suddenly I'm completely transported. And then King Solomon's Minds came, next came and that was it.
I was off.
It was unstoppable, and I read everything, and I read the school library dry, I read the town library dry.
I was.
I was such a pain in the ass that when I was eleven, my mother marched me down to the second hand bookshop in the town and said give him a job.
And I and I got a job in in in.
This books bookshop, and I used to sit there reading books. And the owner, a guy called Mickey Heron, who was this willowy, yellowy, smoked out individual. He used to make tea with moldy milk, and he'd handed to me and it was disgusting, and he'd asked me to do things and I'd be yam, yeah, and just give me, just give me five minutes. And I'd be sitting there just churning through a book.
And That's what it was like.
And then I discovered music, and but books was Books was fundamental. It was like the quiet energy in my life. So no matter what was going on, fiction was the thing. And I remember reading, of course with you know, Shakespeare was all along, but jard Manley Hopkins just lit up my brain like a Christmas tree. T. S. Eliot and many other poets. Mayor of the Mayor of Casterbridge by
Thomas Hardy. I remember reading that and getting to the end and actually encountering a feeling inside myself that I'd never met through a walk of art before it broke me and I sat on the bed and I wept.
God, it makes sense. You're a Thomas Hardy fa Yeah, yeah, unlocks it awful lot. I'm chasing that head ever since, and I'm trying to do that.
To just traumatizing this new generations.
Yeah, yeah, here we go, so kind of it. Yeah, I know, and I'm sorry, you know, but this is that.
Feeling is a young reader where you're like, I didn't know you could do that. You know that that part of the response is I think the earliest stuff you often read as a kid goes to a happy ending or goes to kind of particular beats of narrative that are tried and true. And the first time you read a piece of literature that breaks that, something opens up absolutely.
It shows you the tragic worldview.
It opens you out to a sort of almost cosmic view.
Of what we are, what life is.
That instead of offering solace, instead of offering the happy ending, it offers you, I mean as a teenager.
It offers you the view of, well, this is actually.
How it ends, this is how it plays out. This is the nature of tragedy. Life is lost, life is impermanent, and these are the things that imprint you very deeply.
And that the power of truth and fiction is what makes great fiction endure.
I always say this when I teach that the great works, the Classics, it is a body of wisdom.
And it speaks to what we are, the human condition.
It speaks to what we are always And we go back to the Classics and we see ourselves in there. But we see ourselves as we are, not offering easily as it's easy, easy consolation. We see the whole gamut of it, which also includes joy and wonder and beauty.
And I think that I've always said this that.
Even though many of my books are very dark, I also think they're very beautiful. I think that they're alert to the wonderers, They're alert to what makes this very special.
I think that's true, and I think beauty is an important and recurring part of your books. But the engine often seems to be a desire to articulate something fundamentally broken about the human condition, rather than something redemptive. Do you associate artistic endeavor with.
Pain pain?
I think that what I'm trying to get at is a sense of the complexity of.
Being a human being. And I love this line, how much human being is in a human being? I think it's my project. I'm just interested in how we arrive at ourselves.
How do we define ourselves when things go wrong?
Because very often in my books.
There's a character who feels that they're in control of their lives, and then something happens and then they're met with the unknown. This happens to us in all our lives. One minute we're here, the next minute we're there. You look back, that's gone. You find yourself in a place where you're placeless because the future that you would imagine no longer exists. You're in this placeless no place where you're just trying to get back to what you were.
And when you do that, you're just trying to get.
Back to your own sense of dignity, your own sense of who you are. And all my characters meet this in different ways, and very often there's a labyrinth. And I'm very interested in the idea of philosophical blindness.
We live our lives, but we live it in a labyrinth.
We cannot see what's ahead of us, We cannot measure the enormity of the forces around us, and we are all surrounded by these enormous forces, these great winds that throw us around like specks of dust. And for anybody who thinks, well, that's not true, COVID, that's simple. Suddenly we were all powerless, and all our lives, they're always things shaping us. And I'm interested in that idea of, well, how much free will is there?
How much do we really have? And within that the ability to just.
Move through the labyrinth And and and my characters they make these decisions, are always trying to outmaneuver the fates, and.
The fates are blind, and I'm fascinated by that.
Coming up Paul reveals how he almost didn't write profits On in the first place, and why he resists the label of political right. We'll be right back. The experience of reading this book is not unlike having a three four hundred page panic.
Attack very slowly.
That you build this world, you build human beings that you make us care about, and then you very slowly turn the screws across the length of the book. I want to start with that idea of very slowly, because this is an incremental tragedy, and I want to know when you hit upon the pace of the thing.
Well, I had been writing the wrong book for about six months. I knew I was writing the wrong book and was drilling through granite rock and getting nowhere. And it was a Friday afternoon, about three o'clock, and I just thought, jeez, I'm done with this this thing, whatever it is, this failure of a novel. I didn't It didn't have the juice, it didn't have the sense of a story, the vessel that I looked for to to carry the reader along but also carrying my obsessions along.
And so I just said, I'm done. I'm gonna turn but return to work on Monday and see what happens. I had this sense there was something back there in the door, that door into the dark, that there was something would come through.
And you do this as a writer. You learn to trust your intuition. You learned to listen to.
That small quiet voice came back in Monday, I created a document.
I waited and I wrote opening page. It was there. The pace was there.
What dictates the pace is the feeling of now, the feeling of the moment that we're in. The book is written in close third person, in the present tense, so we're always in the space.
That Alish's inhabiting. We're in these domestic spaces. We're in these moments where she's.
Dealing with kids, teenagers who are killing each other.
There's not enough milk in the fridge. That just keeps happening throughout the novel.
It's an intimate domestic space, and the book just inhabits that. And there are many moments in the book that occupy what Virginia Wolf called moments of being, where just that sense of being in time.
We all have it, we just we.
All have these moments every so often where you lose yourself, the little voice in your ear disappears the chattering self, and you enter into the now, the world, and you just suddenly forget that you are you, and you're in this space. It's it's the most perfect inhabitation of life and of now. And I say this to somebody who's also a meditator and have been meditating for a.
Very long time.
And so the book is full of these kind of moments where Alias is just inhabiting her space.
And so when you do that in.
The present tense, you're bringing the reader into that space with her, and so it progresses piece by piece, but at the same time there is also the larger dimension of what's unfolding, and so you know, there's the classic metaphor of you know, the frog in the pot of water and the temperature is ratcheting up so slowly you don't see it. This is also the world that Ali's in.
This is the world of profit Song, where what is unraveling beginstro unravel so slowly that you don't notice it, and at the same time you also deny it because Elish, like all of us, just assumes that the world that we inhabit now will always continue. And Alish lives in a Western liberal democracy, to kind of we've all enjoyed since certainly since World War Two, and the kind of world we presume will continue.
And so.
She's drifting through life in the way we all drift through life, and suddenly she's in a world where in Emergency Powers Act has been has been brought into brought into being by the government. Before the book opens, the media is starting to be curbed, and there's that uneasiness, but there's also that denial, well, it's not really happening. Everything will be fine, and that's part of the creep.
This the creep, and so the anxiety work filters through that creep until you know there's a tipping point and nobody sees it happen, and Alish are taking At one point, she says, now's not a time to speak, Now's the time to remain silent.
It's all over.
At that point, one of the great kind of insights of the book is, and the prevailing sensation of reading the book, is that the tipping point is already behind us. You know, the point at which we begin, the tipping point has already happened. If we're living, if Alish is living in a kind of perpetual now dealing with the reality as it is in front of her, that moment has already passed.
Yeah, And it makes me think of something related to this, which is that we all have this feeling when I mean, if you're reading the book or we watching these kind of similar situations in films, we say I would have known, I would have left, I would have got my family out in time.
We all do it.
We watched the documentary, so I'd be gone, belong gone, Well, really would you? And this is what the book is exploring because denial is complex. Alis's denial is also related to the complexity of her life. And she's somebody who's completely enmeshed in her world.
She's at that point where, you know, mid forties, you.
Get this squeeze. You know, you've got kids, You've got career, you know. She she's very high up in a pharmaceutical company. She's got of course, Larry, her husband, who works for a trade union, has been taken in for and taken in by the GNSB, the Garden National Services Burea, who.
Are the secret police.
He's not released, he's been swallowed by the state. So she's trying to get her husband released. She's got a father called Simon, who is a retired scientist, and he's starting into dementia.
Life's complex.
And before you go on, I just want to ask off the back of that, I'm really interested in how important it was that Alis shouldn't Simon was scientists.
Very Oh yeah, So it's a great question.
It really distills down to a moment about truth, about the meaning of truth, about the rational in many ways, if you could say to a certain extent that philosophically speaking, the project of rational enlightenment, the project of liberal democrats, is that telelogically, we're moving towards a kind of rational utopia. We keep adding more rationality onto more rationally. This is how we get to the best way we can live. And we do that through science, science and.
All the marvelous.
Methods that we've designed to get us closer to human truth and scientific truth. And but that's the world that's been left behind. It's a post truth space. And Simon, who is you know, as he says, he is slightly into dimension, but his these moments of profound lucidity, and he says to Elish at one point he says, you know you've taken the degree you understand what the real is.
But you need to see what they're doing.
They are, you know, once they're taking control of the institutions. And once you take control of the institutions, you can take control of the facts because you can change the narratives. And once you do that, you start to muddy reality. You start to muddy the real That's what they're doing, he said, he says, And that's the post truth world. And we are all in a space now where there are people who no longer agree about.
The consensus reality.
We used to We used to all inhabit a consensus reality where you know, there would be different opinions about what we should do with the consensus reality, and that was worth fighting for. But now there are people who literally see a complete different reality than the one we think we're all in. And it's like, you know, we're off with the blue pill and the red pill, and they took the blue pill thinking that.
But they haven't actually got to the reel at all.
They've got to they're gone on the rabbit hole, and it's disturbing. And so this is this is this is the world that Profit Song is in in many respects, and and you know, Elish is too busy for it and her sister in Canada, who's watching the unraveling of a first world country on the news. Sister sister, history is a silent record of those who did not know when to leave, and Ellie says, that's very well for you to say, I'm here, I'm dealing with the kids.
I'm dealing with my life. Mark Stone is leaving. Their dad's not well, and what if he falls and breaks a hip?
What then?
One of my favorite tweets during COVID and during the lockdown for some untweeted great the apocalypse is here and I still have to go to work.
And there is something in.
That idea, the way in which the mundane, but also our social structures, our conventions, our expectations, assert themselves almost at the expense of objective reality. These are the things that we understand. These are the markers through which were the final life.
This is part of life in the labyrinth.
You know, you deal with what's before you, you deal with what you have to deal with, and the scale of the problems that are unfolding around you. Well, you don't have time to do what We don't have time to sit back and measure them or try and work them out because you're dealing with getting milk.
Is there milk in the fridge, You've got to go to the supermarket, You're going to do all these other things.
That's the complexity they leasues in and I'm really interested in that complexity. And you know, I've said this before because I just it's to me, it's so it's so much also about what this book is about. This book is not about the politics. You take the Iliad and you look at what the Iliad is.
How it fore grands the politics. It four grands the heroes.
The action profit song is burning Troy in the background. If you turn the Iliad inside out, you arrive at ali Stack. You arrive at the personal cost of events. There's those hidden moments of life, of domesticity, of somebody losing.
Their world, their universe, the known world that is to them. That's what I'm chasing in this book.
And that's you know, that's when that's that's the mythic dimension in this book. You know, people say, oh, this book's are dystopian fiction. To me, it's not at all, Like, of course, it's it's handy to frame it as such, but this book is far too much in conversation with the past and the present. What is happening now, what has always happened throughout time.
And what will continue to happen throughout time. That's what this book is about.
And so there's a mythic space in this conversation that I'm not sure maybe the dystopian fiction would allow for.
So I want to then challenge you a little bit and push back on this idea and.
Challenge to me here, God, it's too easy. Where do you get off? No, no, no, that's not it.
I accept what you're saying about the metaphysical rather than the political, But a novel like this, particularly in the contemporary world, being the way it is that world that you're describing, becomes an inherently political act, like, regardless of your authorial intention, the way it's received, the way it's reviewed, the way it's read, the impact that has on readers around the world is an intensely political one. And I'm curious about how you reconcile that.
Yeah, it's been very interesting me personally to discover that I have written a political novel, because I you know, I've always said I'm not a novelist, and I made a point of saying that after winning the book a prize, because I suddenly saw the label above my head and I thought, well, I'd better get out from under this label very quickly. And there are many reasons why I've said that, because I think that my project remains the same. The situation in this book is part of the anthropological
laboratory that I create. I create a situation, I put my characters into it, and the things that I'm tasting and looking for goes back to the metaphysical concerns about problems of knowledge and problems of being alive and what's any human being. But despite that, the book has this layer, this political layer, and I can't deny that. I can't deny that the book has an attitude to the world. I can't deny that it has a political point of view. I can't deny that it.
Has moral power.
I believe this book does have moral power, and that's part of what's what you know, what's what's brought me to hear.
But that was not the goal. And I talk about this.
Because to me, it's quite important to to to sort of ascertain the difference we've had, you know, a good ten years where a lot of fiction has.
Been decidedly political.
It's it's it's been coming from a particular point of view. Where as a citizen I would agree with pretty much all of it, but as a writer, i'm i'm I'm a little bit skeptical at times because it's my it's my personal view. That you know that when you're coming at fiction from the point of view of grievance, you're
trying to fix something that can be fixed. You you know the answer to the thing you want fixed, there's an answer, and so the fiction is limited by that it actually knows its own answers, and so a lot of writers are writing that way. I look back over the canon, over whatever the canon is, whatever way you want to, you know, appraise that in your mind. The great books all operate out of grievance. They operate out of the things that we are, but cannot change the
human condition. What it is that that that.
Lies beyond us? What? What? What you know?
The true nature of lass and the true nature of the impossibilities of knowledge? And Keats talked about this thing called negative capability, that the greatest writers were those who wrote towards the mysterious. They wrote towards that which we could not know, and that without without looking for certainty, without looking for answers, and they were comfortable in that space,
because life is fundamentally mysterious. When we step back and we think about it, it's truly strange, and there is so many layers to it, and the political.
Is just one lens.
But when you sit back, you realize that life is it's too complex for that, and great writing needs that complexity, and so that's what I chase. And so when I hear the lens of the political, I kind of go, oh God, because that's just boxing me into this little thing. And I think that fiction needs to be maximal in its complexity.
I think you achieve that in spades. And I'm sorry for how many more times you're going to be referred to as an author of political dystopia, both of which are wrong and inadequate to describe the scale of what
you've done here. What happens after this, what happens after you produce a work of art like this that does connect with readers across the world, even outside France, where it speaks to their fears about themselves, about their loved ones, about the human condition, about the nature of the world that we're in. I mean, this is you've now created a rod for your back. How do you sit down and just trust in the writing again without all that noise?
Well, I mean writing, Getting back to writing is something I'm gonna have to learn to do again, because the scale of the booker can't be underestimated, you know, the imprint of it on the psyche is enormous, and the noise is enormous. And I find it very hard even just to get bandwidth, just to be me, let alone to write. There's no writing. When you win it, you're told you you're not going to write for a year.
In truth, it's longer than that. At some point, I'm going to have to pull the shutters down because this is beautiful. To connect with audiences is beautiful, and it's an honor and a privilege to be able to do that. But the reason that I became a writer, and the reason that most people become writers, is that there's just this authentic self that needs to be articulated. It's a small, quiet voice, and you live for that voice. You live
for communicating with that authentic self. And the days where I am lost in language in my quiet room and.
There's no emails.
I'm just writing and then I finish after three or four hours, and then I just go to the shop and do whatever I have to do. They're the best days in the world. That's what I live for, and it'll be hard to get back to that because everyone's knocking.
On the door now.
I wish for you that small quiet room again. So but I'm so honored and privilege you've joined us here to that. Please join me in thanking the extraordinary called Thank You. Pull Into's profit Song, along with his four previous novels, is available at all good bookstores now, and you can probably pick up an old Thomas Hardy book while you're there. Before we get out of here, I wanted to let you know what I've been reading this week, and it's another Irish book, this one a new release
from the wonderful Kevin Barry. I loved his novel Nightboat to Tangiers a few years back. His latest is just a novella, a little slip of a thing and a western of all things. But it's characteristically gorgeous and surprising and precise. It's called The Heart in Winter and it's terriffic. You can find Kevin Barry's books and all the others we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your
friends about it and rate and review us. It helps a lot read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.