Paul Lynch - “Art must be free, like dreams must be free”

How does it feel to be at festivals speaking about Prophet Song, which won the Booker? Have you been to India before?

It is an honour to be invited to any country to speak about my work, particularly India because I have never been here before. When you sit down and write a book, nobody is asking you to write it. There is no pressure from the world. You are just following an act of the imagination; following your inspiration. When the book is published, things change. You find yourself being asked to travel. It is marvellous! It is kind of magical that this little story you made up in your head can somehow resonate with people faraway from where you live. I am probably not saying anything profound here but this is how I feel about being here.

How does your family deal with everyone vying for your time and attention?

My daughter, who is eight years old, says, “Daddy, I am sick and tired of everybody stopping you in the streets and saying: Congratulations!” I spoke to her about the nature of fame, told her that fame comes to you and you do not choose fame. Also, the fact that fame is not straightforward. When everybody knows who you are, everybody is watching you. When you go to the farmers’ market to buy vegetables, there are times when you get stopped by people. Life becomes a little more complicated. I have a five-year-old too. He doesn’t care.

In what way has the city of Dublin shaped your literary sensibilities?

I like to think that there are two Dublins. There is, of course, a mythic literary Dublin — the one that belongs to James Joyce and his book The Dubliners — and there is the real world that I live in. I am a normal person who leads a normal life. I shop in supermarkets. I bring my kids to school. I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning the house and cooking food. That world of banality is the Dublin that I dive into in Prophet Song. At the same time, perhaps I am making that feel mythic to the reader. While writing this book, it was really important for me that I deepen the sense of the real. I thought that if people were going to perceive Prophet Song as dystopian fiction — a form that I was keen to explore with this novel — I needed to make it more realistic for them by layering it with elements of the typical everyday Dublin that I see, know and experience.

What kind of research went into understanding and portraying the workings of Ireland’s newly formed secret police, which is a major presence in Prophet Song?

I did a lot of research on life in totalitarian societies, and what it is like to dream under those challenging circumstances. I was really interested in understanding how a totalitarian regime infests or infects the dreams of the citizens. Larry, who is a trade unionist in Prophet Song, is asked to prove that his behaviour is not seditious. The particular question that Larry is asked was inspired by an occurrence in Silas Marner, the George Eliot novel where Marner has a fit and he is asked to prove that it was not caused by the devil. That is a terrifying thing to have levelled at you. How can you prove something like that?

Did your interest in the devil come from being raised in a Catholic household? To what extent did that influence your work on Prophet Song?

Catholicism was all pervasive when I was a kid. It dominated the country. Ireland was a theocratic state, whether we like to admit that or not. That, fortunately, is no longer the case. We booted the church out in the last 15 years. When I was a kid, I rebelled against it. I think I am naturally an atheist. That’s just who I am. By the age of 14 or 15, I was just done with religion but it was part of the very air that I breathed. It was part of Irish culture. Everything was dominated by and infused with the presence of the church. It was a very oppressive country for a long time. What’s happening now is that Ireland is reidentifying itself culturally because we have thrown off the shackles of the church. My generation, which has been in charge for some time now, and the next generation – we are free of that particular enmeshment of the church and the state. This is liberating, especially for women who now have freedoms that they did not have before. Ireland is a profoundly different country now.

Daisy Rockwell, who won the International Booker Prize last year, has been mobilizing authors, translators and publishers to speak out against the genocide in Palestine. How do you plan to use your new found fame as a Booker winner?

In Ireland, we watched how Bono (singer-songwriter and activist) used his fame. That can be problematic. As a writer, I am a very private person. I don’t see activism as part of my job. I think there is a dignity required to be a serious writer. Once you start grandstanding on political issues, you are thrown into muddy waters. I think that it is problematic to conflate the role of the writer and the activist. I don’t have any such political aspirations. I just want to be a person who writes quietly. Honestly, a writer is all that I would like to be. My problem right now is that I am not getting enough time to write because I have to do all this – travel, speak at festivals, and give interviews. I do not need to change the world. I need to change only my world so that I can get my next story and write it down.

You were a film critic before you became a novelist. How has the experience of watching and analysing cinema influenced your writing style?

The way in which I write is very imagistic. When I write about a character behaving in a particular way, I want my readers to be able to visualize what is unfolding. I don’t want to tell them. There are many writers who do that. Not me. I want my readers to see what is happening — see it very clearly — and to feel it, to smell it, to inhabit it. I think that a lot of modern fiction has been influenced by cinema. And that is certainly true of my work. When cinema was born, filmmakers were looking to the early Victorian novel for the grammar of how to tell stories visually. And modern fiction writers have been looking to cinema for inspiration. There is always this conversation between fiction and cinema. My imagination is naturally very visual, so I write like that. Whether it’s cinematic or not, I don’t know.

Tell us more about this visual imagination. Do you often find yourself drawing on images, symbols and motifs from Irish mythology and folklore?

No, I can’t say that I do! My third novel Grace, which is set during the Great Irish Famine, is somewhat of an exception in this regard because it does have some aspects of Irish folklore and mythology in it. Otherwise, I am a very modern writer, and I don’t look back to the past of Ireland because that past is problematic in many ways. It is really important that modern Irish writers find new ways of telling Irish stories. This is what I aim to do.

You have written about dementia in Prophet Song. Did you have to work with a sensitivity reader, given that publishers are now making a special effort to ensure that depiction of disability and mental health in fiction is not reinforcing stereotypes?

If any publisher asked me to work with a sensitivity reader, I would just drop that publisher. Art must be free, like dreams must be free. Once you start putting constraints on dreaming, that is the beginning of trouble. Dreams do not belong in prisons. They need to breathe. If art is not free, it ceases to be art. You cannot please everybody. I am not saying that writers should go out there and offend people. I am saying they should be free to create.

What was it like to work with an independent publisher like Oneworld on this book? Did it give you things that a big shot commercial publisher would not offer?

The fundamental gift of working with an indie publisher is that you get to work with an editor who is free to publish whatever they like. Juliet Mabey, who founded Oneworld, is not interested in trends or big commercial sales. She publishes books that she loves, so her specific literary taste is what guides her decision-making. At the bigger publishing houses, there is a lot of pressure because they have sales targets to meet. That’s not the case with Oneworld. Most of the award-winning fiction in the last 10 years has been published by independent publishing houses. That says something about them, doesn’t it?

What are you currently working on?

Nothing! I am working on trying to be me, which is difficult.

Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist and educator. He is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.