“I just couldn’t believe this had happened to me,” Paul Lynch says. We’re sitting in his kitchen, in the back of his terraced house in Dublin 12. Last month, his fifth novel, Prophet Song, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but we’re talking here about the terrifying news that he received around this time last year.
“I was 45, I was a health freak, I was fit,” Lynch says. But during a chest scan, a radiologist accidentally discovered a tumour on Lynch’s kidney. In that moment, his life was turned upside down. “I sat down on my reading chair and I didn’t get up for two days. It was the darkest two days of my life.”
He looks almost stunned by the memory, becoming lost for words for the first time in our conversation. “It’s genuinely a trauma. We had just come out of Covid. There was this sense of, okay, now life re-begins, and then you find yourself caught within the life shock.”
As life’s rollercoaster ground out its loops, Lynch is very grateful to find himself cancer-free a year later and on the Booker longlist, along with three other Irish writers – Sebastian Barry, Elaine Feeney and Paul Murray. “It’s the happiest distraction,” Lynch says with a large grin.
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I’ve known Lynch personally for more than 20 years, ever since we worked together in the Sunday Tribune. We became friends, playing in rock bands and sharing stages around Dublin. He’s been nominated for prizes before, and won his fair share, including the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2018 and a host of French awards (he’s big in France), so he’s equanimous about being longlisted. “If it happens it happens. The fact is not everyone can win all the time. There’s 13 people so only one person is going to win.”
Lynch’s home is neat and orderly. There’s a reading chair in the front room, a huge collection of jazz records, and two metal-styled electric guitars on stands. He picks one up and spontaneously plays a solo from the Iron Maiden song Heaven Can Wait. “I learned it recently,” Lynch says ruefully.
At the back of the house, the kitchen looks on to a magical garden decorated with pretty Chinese lanterns and lights, beyond which stands the writing studio where Lynch works. The room has a desk, a chair and a wall of books. The collected works of Samuel Beckett stands out, its spines misordered so Beckett’s face is a jumbled Picasso. When I chastise Lynch for disrespecting Beckett, he tells me it’s deliberate, so he doesn’t have to feel the unbroken weight of Beckett’s gaze upon him as he writes.
Lynch abandoned an English and philosophy degree in UCD for the world of work, but he still likes to quote philosophy and says he read Seneca’s Letter 13 every day for months during his illness and recovery – “it kept my head straight and over the years I’ve always gone back to the Stoics during times of crisis”.
Prophet Song tells the story of a different crisis. When Eilish Stack’s trade unionist husband Larry disappears at a protest, a sequence of events forces her to make increasingly desperate decisions to save her family. It feels very much like a pandemic book with its curfews and shutdowns but Lynch says its origins were the Syrian refugee crisis.
“I was obsessing over the fact that a modern country could collapse like that. I was watching the greatest refugee crisis since World War two, astonished by it, lamenting it and just taken aback at the West’s general indifference,” Lynch says.
“I kept thinking about the two-year-old kid, Alan Kurdi, who washed up on the Turkish beach. I started to think, what does it take for an ordinary, intelligent person to put themselves and their children on one of those boats?”
The part of me, the egoic self, that thought I was just definitely going to live until I was 100, well that part is just gone forever
His description of a totalitarian Ireland feels chillingly plausible. “We are all in the West just two or three governments away from democratic collapse and within that are the conditions for a slide and democratic disruption.”
Lynch has written a brilliant woman protagonist before in his novel Grace. What draws him towards the female voice? “The book was always going to be about Eilish because we need to get very close to her so we can see how her sense of reality has been compromised, how the real is no longer the real.
“I was thinking of writers like Kafka or Beckett who somehow caught the flavour of the philosophical terror of the times they lived in and that was something I wanted to do in this book. Being a male writer and being asked about female characters is kind of like a painter being asked if they can paint green or blue. Of course they can, it’s the job. Fundamentally the question is what is the aesthetic quality of the work, what is its truthfulness?”
Lynch didn’t always know he was a writer. He had written poetry as a teenager. “I was very serious about it, it may have been overwrought or densely modernist but I was serious about it. I remember this girl in my class and I had a crush on her and I remember I wrote this poem on another friend’s folder so that he could then slide the folder over during history class so that she could read it and say, oh, who wrote that…it didn’t work,” he laughs.
To be alive now is a wondrous thing. I’ve realised that I’m much more happy-go-lucky about the general unfolding of life
It wasn’t until he was 30, on a trip to the Italian island of Lipari, that the realisation struck him. “I realised that I needed to do this even if it meant poverty, even if it meant the more challenging life, and there’s no doubt about it, it is the more challenging life, there’s no security, so it’s not an easy life, but it’s the authentic life,” Lynch explains.
Born in Limerick, and raised in Donegal, Lynch says he has always felt like an outsider. “I had a very secure upbringing but I wouldn’t describe my sense of self in the Donegal I grew up in as secure. I felt isolated as a child, I felt that I didn’t belong because I was told consistently by other kids that I was an outsider so I grew up with that sense of not belonging. And you’ll see that deeply in my books, a lot of my characters have that outsider mentality. If you’re a sensitive, intuitive male, which I am, then that presents challenges growing up.”
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Lynch describes his creative process as almost spiritual. “There’s an aspect of mind the Greeks called the daemonic, the part of you that is in communication with the gods. It’s an aspect of the religious mind that taps into the higher order of things and writers access this same state creatively,” Lynch says.
“Once you access that on a regular basis you’ve accessed another realm of self, a state that’s joyful to be in, you disappear into the work, into a version of yourself that’s operating on a much higher level than you do ordinarily and certainly it’s not available to you when you’re putting the kids to bed and making the dinner and going around Lidl doing the shopping.”
Does being a parent conflict with being a writer? “The old models are gone, not just how males should conduct themselves but how male writers should conduct themselves in the world. The door to my writing room is never locked to the kids and so I think it’s been a challenge for me personally of how to find that space to be a dad and also to be an artist because both of them are enormously demanding and there’s no easy answer. Every day is a compromise.”
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With that it’s time for him to collect his children from their summer camp. Like many people who have been through a life-threatening illness, Lynch says he sees life with different eyes now. “The part of me, the egoic self, that thought I was just definitely going to live until I was 100, well that part is just gone forever. It was a profound shock and I have to say the thoughts of me as an artist fell away. I thought primarily about my children. The idea of not being around for them was the most distressing feeling I’ve ever had in my life and even saying it now I feel very emotional.”
His eyes well up and his voice cracks. “To be alive now is a wondrous thing. I’ve realised that I’m much more happy-go-lucky about the general unfolding of life,” Lynch says.
“We go through life thinking I have things – I have this job. I have my health. I have my family. I have all of these things. But in truth none of them are yours, they’re things you’re experiencing in this moment in time and none of them [are] guaranteed.
“And it is this particular frailty, the line between the things we take for granted and the moment we lose them, I’ve always been interested in that in my fiction. I think all my books are an attempt to create a symbol for how we live our lives because life is always full of moments of transcendence. Sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed and we’re always trying to overcome.”
Prophet Song is published by Oneworld. The Booker Prize shortlist will be announced on September 21st
