Paul Lynch's Prophet Song: A Perplexing Beginning
The linguistic complexity of Lynch's first chapter signals the demanding nature of the story to come.
Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song opens with a challenge. The prose is syntactically snarled, expansive, and takes noticeable effort to process. Lynch asks the reader: Are you in? You will have to commit to deeply focusing to descend into this dark but important, unrelenting tale, but I have crafted it carefully. The dystopian novel tells the story of a mother of several young children who fights against the Republic of Ireland’s gradual, unrelenting transformation into a totalitarian state.
The first section of the novel is especially tricky to process due to unrelenting linguistic acrobatics. For the sake of this post, my focus is narrow, exploring one particular type of sentence. Here are the key sentences as a preview (the first example consists of the first two sentences of the novel):
The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out onto the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. (p.1)
Eilish closes the kitchen door and places the child in the rocker, begins to clear from the table her laptop and diary but stops and closes her eyes. (p.3)
With these sentences in mind, let me back up and give some definitions and context.
In this post, I chose one specific type of sentence to scrutinize the type of complexity Lynch introduces. Linguists call the interesting thing that happens in this type of sentence Heavy Noun Phrase Shift (HNPS). HNPS is the tendency for speakers/writers to place a long direct object phrase at the end of the sentence rather than in its usual position next to the verb. Some non-Lynch examples, to give more of an idea: [1]
Sarah attacked __ with no mercy the family of ants living on the windowsill.
The kitten imitated __ in the backyard the shaggy dog who could catch a ball.
In the first example here, the NP the family of ants living on the windowsill has three times as many syllables as the prepositional phrase with no mercy that it moved to the right of.[2] In the second example, the direct object “the dog” is modified both by an adjective and a relative clause that is itself structurally complex. In syntax, a “heavy” noun phrase is then either prosodically heavy (as in the first example, with more syllables than usual), or syntactically complex (with significant internal structure). A speaker or writer can opt to move a heavy noun phrase to the end of a sentence.
Even though there is a noted preference for heavier constituents to go on the right, HNPS phrasing taxes processing. An eye-tracking study[3] concluded in fact that HNPS is a last resort of the parser when the language processing area of the brain tries to assign phrase structure to a string of words.
A transitive verb must be followed by an object (Simone hit the target/*Simone hit; Noah brought dessert/*Noah brought, etc.). In the eye-tracking study including the HNPS examples above, one experiment found that when participants encountered a prepositional phrase separating the verb from the object, processing difficulty resulted.
Returning to the Lynch examples, what caught my attention was the lightness of the noun phrase that shifted. Again:
The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out onto the garden. How the dark gathers __ without sound the cherry trees. (p.1)
Eilish closes the kitchen door and places the child in the rocker, begins to clear __ from the table her laptop and diary but stops and closes her eyes. (p.3)
The Lynch examples flout the usual heaviness that motivates this type of structure, pushing boundaries and making processing of the reading more difficult. Although HNPS is not a frequent construction in the novel, it does recur beyond the opening pages. However, once the story has begun and the reader is immersed, we only see conventional instances of HNPS:
She turns to Molly inhaling __ from her hair the fading scent of jasmine, sensing the mind at peace beneath the sleeping breath, to reach in with her hand and pull the terror out by the root, to caress the mind back to its old shape. (pp. 198-199)
The man touches her wrist and tells her that a smuggler has opened shop in an electrical store on Crumlin Road, she might be able to find __ there some of the things she wants. (p.236)
She [Molly] begins to mutter then makes a small cry, sits up rubbing her eyes and Eilish can see __ in her eyes the terror reaching out from the dream. (p. 286)
In these later-appearing HNPS examples, the noun phase moved to the end of the clause is legitimately heavy – with 2-6 times as many syllables as the phrase it moves after, and with at least two phrases inside the moved noun phrase.
Lynch’s later examples of HNPS behave as expected, moving only indisputably heavy NPs. The conventionality of his use of HNPS later in the story adds plausibility to the idea that he exploits the reader’s expectations early in the story with the (presumably subconscious) intention of defamiliarizing the syntax, taxing language processing, and thus preparing the reader for a difficult (if highly rewarding, in my opinion) read.
[1] Staub, Adrian, et al. “Heavy NP Shift Is the Parser’s Last Resort: Evidence from Eye Movements.” Journal of Memory and Language, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2006, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1615890/#FN2.
[2]For simplicity, I am assuming a movement analysis, although there are other ways of deriving this structure. The relevant point is that it deviates from the default phrase pattern of an English sentence.
[3] Ibid.