(The Scent of a Book) A tragedy in the news that suddenly arrived at my doorstep

Police raided after union participation… A family struggling in a totalitarian system
Last year’s British Booker Prize winner… Experimental depiction of human inner self
◇Song of the Prophet/Written by Paul Lynch/Translated by Heo Jin/364 pages, 18,000 won, Ginkgo Tree

This is a new book that readers who like dystopian novels such as ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984’ should pay attention to. While existing dystopian novels often create new settings, such as virtual countries, and unfold within them, this book, which won the British Booker Prize last year, is set in reality. This is why the message that totalitarian dictatorship can strike anyone, at any time, resonates even more.

The novel tells the story of a family fighting for survival against the backdrop of an Ireland swept by totalitarianism. One day, a plainclothes police officer comes to the main character Eilish’s house. She came to look for her husband, who participated in the teachers’ union. All common sense procedures, such as meeting with a lawyer or protesting illegal detention, are omitted.

Eilish’s four children are constantly looking for their mother, and even their father, whose dementia is getting worse every day, needs his daughter’s help. In addition, the eldest son received a conscription notice, and the youngest son was denied a passport. A beleaguered situation continues where neither flight nor waiting is a choice.

The author reveals the extreme anxiety felt by the characters through experimental methods such as removing quotation marks and using commas instead of periods. This is the conversation Eilish and his wife have in their bedroom after receiving a call at 1:15 a.m. that a co-worker has been detained. The husband’s words and the wife’s words were mixed in confusion.

“Carol said Michael went to the police station, but they didn’t talk to him properly, so he said he was going home because it was night. He said he couldn’t contact the GNSB (National Security Service), and he didn’t have a direct number. I don’t understand why the union didn’t call me. I’m not going. It seems like a really big problem. no. What isn’t it? “There’s a number on the detective’s business card that came to my house last night, a cell phone number, and you called it yourself. Tell me, Larry, what’s going on?”

My husband is gloomy, nervous, and rigid as if he is under great pressure. At some point, I started behaving like a criminal myself. Eilish feels unfamiliar and helpless as she looks at her husband who has changed. The light next door won’t turn on starting today, and my coworker won’t come out starting today. In this way, the true nature of the political unrest is slowly penetrated into the protagonist’s life without being specifically mentioned.

“If you say A is B, if you say it over and over again, it’s bound to happen, and if you say it over and over again, people take it as truth. Of course this is an old idea, nothing new, but you are watching it happen in your own time, not in a book.”

By allowing us to experience the tragedy of an individual up close, the novel powerfully reminds us that the wars and disasters we hear about in one or two lines of the news are actually the end of countless individuals. A system that is taken for granted can collapse at any time. 2023 Booker Prize winner. At the time, the judges stated the background of the award, saying, “It portrayed the reality of state violence and displacement without worrying about anything else,” and “It is a book that resonates with many of today’s political crises, but won solely for its literary merit.”