Six Degrees: Prophet Song to Waterland

The great chain of books – #6Degrees. There’s an explanation of how all this works here.  Everyone is welcome to join in. 

This is my contribution for March 2025

The starting point is Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023) the  Booker Prize-winning dystopian novel set in a near-future Ireland collapsing into authoritarianism.

It follows Eilish Stack as she struggles to keep her family together amid escalating political turmoil. Themes of totalitarianism, displacement, and survival make it compelling first link in a literary chain of (loosely) connected works.

Lynch does an excellent job of depicting a how a perfectly ordinary and recognisable world can begin to disintegrate and the claustrophobic terror when the walls begin to close.

What to do when the unthinkable happens and when disaster looms? Leave? Or stay?

History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.

So many possible literary for connections come to mind – everything from James Joyce’s Dubliners to The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta.

It brought to mind Victor Klemperer’s secret diary I Will Bear Witness : A Diary Of The Nazi Years  that records the daily degradations, deprivations and the closing in and clamping down of tyranny.  Klemperer and his wife had refused to think of leaving until it was too late. His decision to “bear witness'” provides a detailed account of what it meant to live in Dresden under the Nazis.  

I went with another fictional dystopia:

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003)  

Atwood takes us to a post-apocalyptic world where genetic engineering has replaced humanity.

It’s along time since i read it but I know I found it gripping in spite of the grim theme. I remember it kept me fully occupied on a transatlantic flight.

In Oryx and Crake’s world, the planet has heated up ,making life a constant struggle of survival. 

Long before Atwood, another author gave us a climate-changed world headed for catastrophe. Not fire and heat, but cold and

Ice by Anna Kavan (1967)

In this surreal novel an encroaching wall of ice represents both environmental disaster and psychological descent. I wrote about the book and its author here. 

The fragmented, dreamlike narrative is both hallucinatory and mesmerizing. All that ice and freezing chill  – next up – a trip to the South Pole with

The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge (1991)

Kavan’s doomed world finds an echo in Bainbridge’s fictionalized retelling of Captain Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition.

Both novels explore human endurance in the face of inevitable catastrophe. That combination of history and fiction brings me to link number four:

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)

Bainbridge’s historical reimagining connects to Roth’s alternate history. In the 1940 US election,  Charles Lindbergh – with the slogan “Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war” – beats the incumbent president Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide. He steers America toward fascism.

There’s more counterfactual and imagined history with link number five:

Fatherland by Robert Harris (1992)

What if the axis powers had won the war? Harris’s vision of a Nazi-ruled Europe in Fatherland, is historical thriller about a detective in 1964 Berlin who uncovers a secret that could undermine the Nazi regime. I remember it as being a gripping page-turner with the history both meticulously researched and plausibly imagined 

And so to the last link: 

Waterland by Graham Swift (1983)

Harris’s exploration of suppressed history finds a parallel in Swift’s Waterland, a novel that intertwines personal and national histories, questioning how we remember and interpret the past. It’s a family sage with an abundance of eels.

Tom Crick is a middle-aged history teacher with a rather dramatic family crisis on his hand. It leads him to tell the family history of life in the Fenlands. 

I loved this book when I read it forty years ago. I shall have to reread to see if it still holds up. 

Any one of these books sets off chains of connections in all directions. I suppose it’s always like that. Reading is just one damn book after another 

Looking forward to reading where Prophet Song led other readers. 

Next month (April 5, 2025), starts with Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife.