SEEING as it just won the Booker Prize in the immediate aftermath of Dublin’s recent riots – and whilst I’m currently in the city – it seems opportune to talk about Paul Lynch’s new novel.

He imagines an Ireland taken over by fascists – Blut und Boden (blood and soil) style nationalists – and an ensuing civil war, a dystopia that turns nightmarishly apocalyptic.

After said riots, commentators have seized upon Prophet Song’s prescience but is it a truly predictive work? And do the frequent comparisons with Orwell stack up?

The National: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Lynch’s central character – Eilish – is married with four children. Her husband is a trade unionist and gets arrested by the new regime; her eldest son joins the rebels.

As the civil war intensifies, we see Eilish struggling to keep her family together. Her fate becomes Job-like with one remorseless trial after another. Her father struggles with dementia. The kids in the middle act up, her baby is teething, and, on top of all that, she’s got fallen arches; Lynch piles the pressure on. Prophet Song is a gloomy read; the word “dark” and its derivatives appear five times on page one alone.

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The novel – rather than being prognostic of events in Dublin’s immediate future – begins more in tune with Ireland’s past.

There are tense checkpoints, roadblocks, guards wearing shades and toting machine guns, “effigies set alight in town squares”, live rounds shot into peaceful demos.

All very early 1970s, a time when, as Eilish realises, “you have to be quiet and keep your head down” – the time of Seamus Heaney’s famous line: “Whatever you say, say nothing.”

Then there are reminders of even further back, the Irish civil war in the 1920s.

Talk of “terrorists hiding in the civilian population” brings us up to date elsewhere as with mutual accusations by Hamas and the IDF.

Soon enough Eilish’s neighbourhood begins to resemble the hell of contemporary Gaza.

It is this catastrophe, rather than the recent riots in Dublin, that gives the novel its true charge, its relevance and, perhaps, even its Booker win.

There are disappointments. Eilish’s kids are generally humourless. Kids do say the funniest things, even in moments of threat, and this reader would have welcomed the odd laugh.

Characters outside the family are thinly sketched. We hear of Eilish’s neighbours, the Zajacks, but nothing of their experiences, their backstory.

Then there’s a bully boy called Paul Felsner who seems little more than a cardboard cut-out complying with the emergency powers. His not being fleshed seems a lost opportunity.

And Lynch favours the modish habit of eschewing quotation marks, which causes an occasionally irritating “who’s saying this?” stutter while reading dialogue. An older person’s whine … As for those Orwell comparisons – there are no neologisms for the ages as per 1984.

We could also argue that JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun is a more direct and autobiographical account of childhood suffering during war. And the theme of missing relatives has been more convincingly explored in Marcelo Figueras’s novel Kamchatka, about the disappeared during Argentina’s years under the (Henry Kissinger-approved) generals.

But those are niggles. Lynch traps us in a hell that calls to mind the photojournalism of Don McCullin and his terrifying images from Vietnam, from Beirut.

Lynch says he’s trying to provoke a radical empathy, for us to think hard on what it must be like to be a refugee, someone fleeing with nothing.

As the narrative intensifies, the sense of claustrophobia convinces. You’re being warned there may come a time when we’ve gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do. Lynch muses on the fate of those on the wrong side of history.

Prophet Song ends in a bravura piece of emotive writing that is highly effective and affecting.

We learn that the title refers to “the same song sung across time”, of worlds that will be consumed by fire – think of Nazi blitzkriegs, Hiroshima, Dresden, Kissinger (again) bombing Cambodia.

This is the novel as political warning, one whose repetition is indeed timely, one that yells at you – as the old hippies once sang – “Why are we sleeping?”.

But the sceptic might ask: What power can speculative fiction have compared with the nightly traumas we witness in real time on social media, on TV?