Prophet Song, the fifth novel by Dublin-based author Paul Lynch, opens with molecular biologist and mother of four Eilish Stack answering the door to polite but officiously sinister policemen. Ireland, we learn, is now governed by the National Alliance Party, which is gradually transforming the country into a militarised, paranoid totalitarian state under the pretext of combating a ‘national emergency’.

The opening chapters of this gripping, brilliantly realised story of political violence follow Eilish’s attempts to find her husband, Larry, a member of a teachers’ trade union, who is abducted after a protest march. As Eilish comes into conflict with the forces of officialdom, she becomes an enemy of the state: her property is attacked and she is isolated at work. Alone, she is left to shield her dementia-suffering father and children from the growing menace. Her eldest child, Mark, is sent away before he can be called up for national service, while fourteen-year-old Molly develops an eating disorder. Bailey, almost thirteen, becomes ever more disobedient. Eilish’s struggle, described in an urgent present-tense narration, is set against a growing insurgency that plunges Ireland into a civil war that drags her family in, culminating in intense fighting in Dublin between government and rebel forces.

The novel’s themes invite comparisons with the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell, though Prophet Song does not depict a futuristic world replete with a set of rules the reader is required to learn. Instead, Lynch draws on the world around us, which is already infused with the imagery of dystopia. If you want to imagine what a hellish future might look like, Prophet Song says, you need only refer to your history books and television screens.

The characteristic features of despotic rule fill the novel. First, society must be restructured. The secret service disappears Larry and other suspected agitators, while loyalist party goons are elevated to positions of authority. Eilish’s boss and Bailey’s teacher are soon replaced. State media becomes a propaganda mouthpiece – Eilish and her father watch the BBC and tune into long-wave radio for outside media reports – and the internet is blacked out. And then there is the militarisation of society: for government and rebel soldiers alike, violence has become integral to their identity. The consequences of all this are inevitable: Eilish’s attempts to flee the deteriorating situation lead her to join crowds of gaunt, ragged refugees packed into container trucks, vulnerable to the networks of exploiters and gangsters who profit from the misery of war.

While everything in the book is identifiably real, including Dublin’s geography and the localised speech patterns of characters of different classes and backgrounds, Lynch keeps the novel broadly allegorical. We never learn, for instance, what the ‘national emergency’ is. We are led to believe that the National Alliance is a populist, right-wing, ethno-nationalist party, but we are not given a description of its rise or its major personalities and policies; it is enough to understand that the ‘national emergency’ can derive from anything. Lynch does not want to distract us with the type of imaginary futuristic threats often found in dystopian novels, such as rampant technology. The state primarily exercises power by controlling other people’s bodies through bureaucracy and coercion, and by detaining, injuring and killing its enemies. Lynch understands that the pattern of totalitarianism is always the same.

In the depiction of a growing army of citizen-rebels pitted against a hostile government, Prophet Song also reverberates with Irish history. In particular, the scenes of warfare in Dublin recall the terrible violence of the revolutionary years, from the 1916 Easter Rising through the War of Independence (1919–21) to the Irish Civil War of 1922–3. In the 1930s, the small but menacing Blueshirt fascist movement gained temporary popularity. There are also echoes of the Northern Ireland Troubles. In the early 1970s, many Catholics from Northern Ireland fled south to escape loyalist pogroms, becoming in effect refugees from the United Kingdom. With grim irony, in Lynch’s novel the victims of the civil war in the south attempt to cross the newly instituted border with the north – dotted with checkpoints eerily reminiscent of those set up in the worst days of the Troubles – and from there cross on small boats to the safety of Britain.

Lynch’s writing is affecting and often poetic, as in the following passage, where a near-biblical, end-of-days tone comes through:

What is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time … and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event.

The local can be anywhere; other people’s nightmares can be yours. This is a masterly novel that reminds us that democracy is always fragile, and that it is fragile now.