The Best Book I Read This Month: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

The best book I read this month was a hard but powerful read. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch imagines an Ireland plunging into authoritarianism. We watch this descent through the lens of a single family’s experience.

The Stack family are an ordinary middle-class family living in Dublin. Larry is a teacher and union representative. Eilish is a scientist in a biomedical firm. They have four children: teenagers Mark, Molly, and Bailey and infant Ben. Eilish is also caring for her dementia-ridden father, who lives on the other side of town.

The story opens with a late-night visit from the police, who are looking for Larry. Things get worse from there. As the country’s authoritarian leaders clamp down, life in Dublin becomes more difficult—food grows scarce, travel is limited. The country becomes torn by civil war. Eilish struggles to keep her family together as the danger escalates.

It’s a dark story and one that does not offer much, if any, hope. Like other dystopian stories, it’s inspired by things that have happened (in this case, the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis) and a warning of what could be. Living here in the United States, it all hit just a little too close for comfort. Still, it is a worthwhile read, a reminder of the human cost of an authoritarian power grab and of the humanity that exists and persists under authoritarian rule.

The Best Book I Read This Month: 1984 by George Orwell

The best book I read this month is a classic: George Orwell’s 1984. I’d read the book in school many decades ago. Given current events—and my discovery of Sandra Newman’s retelling (I can never resist a retelling!)—it felt like a good time to revisit it.

Whoo boy! It held up. It was stark and powerful. If anything, it resonated more with me now than it did in my student days. (I was always more of a Brave New World girl.) Orwell’s story and his prose lit up my brain like a pinball machine, so much so that, for the first time in my life, I kept a reading journal.

The similarities between the Party rule in 1984 and what’s happening in the United States right now were glaringly obvious to me: the cult of personality; the surveillance state; the insistence on blind obedience; the manipulation of information; the presentation of lies as truth; the use of threats, intimidation, and violence to force compliance; and the creation of a wealthy, insider elite and a poor “outsider” populace. It’s like the current administration and its adherents are using Orwell’s book not as the warning it was intended to be but rather as a how-to guide.

The three maxims of the Party—War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength—nicely sum up the current administration’s policies. The slogans are not all that different from the administration’s use of “Peace through Strength”*** to describe its bombing of Iran, not to mention the ways that the administration’s education and economic policies promote ignorance and wage slavery.

There are differences, of course. In the United States, race and religion play a far bigger role than they do in Orwell’s vision, where the divisions are primarily class divisions. What we are seeing here is the creation of a Christian nationalist elite (with all the white supremacy that goes with it) alongside an oligarchy of (white male) billionaires. Orwell’s world is very much shaped by Soviet totalitarianism (as seen, for example, in Party members’ use of comrade for each other), and I see what’s happening here in the United States as more closely resembling Nazi totalitarianism. But push comes to shove, totalitarianism is totalitarianism, and 1984 is chilling vision of where we could be headed.

***The slogan dates back farther than this administration. It has been part of the Republican platform since 1980 and can be traced back even farther than that. (I’m looking at you, Barry Goldwater.)