Paul Lynch’s novel, a favourite for the Booker Prize, was the focus of an interview which discussed the language of fascist horror and was referred to as a ‘300-page panic attack’.

Paul Lynch, a frontrunner for the Booker Prize, has revealed how the authoritarian horrors in his acclaimed novel Prophet Song emerged as a result of an unsought burst of language on a Monday morning. He claims these near-future horrors were not planned beforehand and were not his conscious response to the political abyss of 2018.

In an interview on Auraist with fellow Irish author Peter Murphy, Lynch discussed the role of prose style in creating believable and profound psychology, allowing readers to become immersed in the finest literature. He said: “Literary style should be a way of knowing how the world is met in its unfolding. And so I shape my sentences around the truth of the unfolding — in other words, my realism is memetic and presses its way into feeling, atmosphere, emotion, etc. Vocabulary, syntax etc., like mobilised troops, follow this initial command.”

The author also touched upon how the appallingly believable authoritarian Ireland conjured into being by the opening sentences of his book seeped into the styles he employed. He said: “For a start, there are the long sentences and there are no paragraph breaks in the book. There is a deep undertow of inevitability at work, a sense of inevitability, and the long sentences and the lack of breaks lock the reader into the same claustrophobic space that Eilish inhabits.”

The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced on the 26th of November and Lynch may be crowned the true master sentence-builder. Read his exclusive interview on prose style at Auraist, an online platform which selects and reviews the best-written books from major prize shortlists.