Last year’s Booker Prize winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is stylistically distinctive. It is written mostly in the present tense, sentences run into each other, and any dialogue is enclosed within the flow of the prose. When the main character’s father opens his front door to let her in, their exchange reads:

Yes? he says, frowning, what do you want? Yes? she says, pushing past him into the hall

Prophet Song is a dystopian novel that tells a human story set in an Ireland controlled by nationalist and populist dictatorship. The nature of this tyrannous government isn’t discussed in the narrative, but Lynch says his inspiration came from thinking about “Brexit, Trump, and the forces gathering on the horizon… I began to wonder what Ireland would look like with a populist government.”

Lynch’s novel is predictably compared with Orwell’s 1984. But Orwell’s dystopia was more identifiable as the future, because it obviously intensified ad absurdum particular characteristics of the 1940s present. 

By contrast, Prophet Song is much more obliquely related to the present, not least because the author seems oblivious to this fact. Startling and dramatic instances of governmental overreach have recently occurred in real life, be it due to the pandemic, big-tech censorship, or the criminalisation of mean tweets and silent prayer. Awkwardly for Lynch, however, none of this came from nationalists or populists, but rather from the self-styled liberals that he portrays as valiantly fighting for their freedom. 

Prophet Song also reads very differently to 1984 stylistically. Orwell writes in the straightforward narrative past, while portraying something happening in the future:

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day’s work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite toward him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles.

Lynch’s opting instead for sentences like, “The tarmac darkens before the downpour as she advances through the carpark”, gives Prophet Song what reviewers have described as a “breathlessness”, and “urgency”, which is well-suited to the unfolding drama of the narrative itself. 

Another recent-ish novel that drew attention for opting almost exclusively for the present tense, is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which won the Booker in 2009. There, Mantel used the third-person present tense to describe the experiences of Thomas Cromwell: “His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out.”  Mantel was praised for having cut through the pretence and “frothiness” of much historical fiction by writing in the pedestrian, straightforward English that people use today. This was said to make the story “relatable” in way that florid and difficult 16th century constructions are not. In this respect Wolf Hall is the polar-opposite to, say, A. S. Byatt’s 1990 Booker winning novel, Possession, in which Byatt deliberately uses inventive narrative strategies which enable her to write in the sophisticated and elephantine sentences of high-flown Victorian prose.

I wonder what future students of English literature will make of the takeover of the present tense in critically-acclaimed 21st century literature. In the same way contexts like industrialisation and the Great War are inextricable from the received narratives of romantic poetry and modernist fiction, what will be the equivalents in this case? 

It’s oft-repeated, but nonetheless true, that we live today in a consciousness of intense immediacy. This is a consciousness without a full awareness of the depth of the difference between the present, the past, and the future. Mark Fisher was one of the first to notice this, saying “21st century culture” is “marked” by both “anachronism”, and “a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’”.  

Continuous anachronism is aptly shown by the music listening habits of the young. Streaming means that a young person today can just as easily, and is just as likely, to listen to something from the 1970s or the 1990s as something from the 2020s. The full impact of the differentiations of time between then and now are not registered like they were for earlier generations, when older music was no longer played on the radio, and so a curious listener would have to acquire an old, physical object, like a cassette or some vinyl, and then find an antiquated device to play it on. 

This continuous anachronism of contemporary consciousness is, strangely, indistinguishable from a persistent sense of the future’s proximity. This is aptly shown by the “real time” news cycle of social media, in which endlessly occurring events are relayed more-or-less as they happen, along with many and varied interpretations of those events, such that the future is always aggressively consuming the present. People don’t ask questions like “where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot?” anymore, because there isn’t that sense of a punctuated moment at which awareness of a particular event was distinctly registered at a definite moment of time, a moment after which the present was different. 

If we no longer fully distinguish things like the dimensions of time, it is unsurprising that novels based in both the past and the future are written in the present tense. It is also no surprise that the examples given above are each significantly askew in their presentations of the past and the future respectively, in their unthinking transpositions of present-day assumptions into the alien worlds of the past or the future. 

Mantel was rightly critiqued for the inaccuracy of her portrayal of Thomas Cromwell by historians. Aside from concerns around historical fact, she also seems not to appreciate that the way we relate to the world, even our inner monologues, are structured by the language we know. If the 16th century is rendered easily “relatable”, it isn’t being rendered accurately as the 16th century. Similarly, Lynch has been rightly critiqued for showing a dystopia so profoundly out-of-step with the realities of the present, and so morally unambiguous in its political messaging. 

The present moment, the now, just is the domain of ethical absolutes, the domain where moral complexity is a privilege

But this loss of moral complexity is exactly what we should expect from present-tense novels. The present moment, the now, just is the domain of ethical absolutes, the domain where moral complexity is a privilege. Hearing the questions, “Would you physically restrain a violent man on the bus?”, or “Have you ever stepped in to help someone under threat?” are very different to hearing someone cry “Help me!” on your way to work. 

Perhaps genuine political resistance for this moment of time should involve a refusal always to adopt an absolutist stance on every single issue. It could mean the complexities of past events and possible future outcomes aren’t squeezed into narrow but instantly “relatable” alternatives deprived of uncertainty and ambiguity. It will mean relating to the past and the future differently, better cultivating a sense of their distance from us — because living only in the present makes one vulnerable to manipulation and control.       

Indeed, the canonical text to which Prophet Song is so often compared, 1984, itself discusses penetratingly the dangers involved in political control of the present, past, and the future: 

“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” … All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it”.