Lynch illustrates this dystopia through the eyes of Eilish Stack, mother of four children (adolescents and baby), whose husband - a trade unionist - suddenly disappears. Nobody can give her answers, no official government agency can help or is willing to help and she receives the signal to stop asking.
In this context she is trying to keep her family together, even this is an incredible challenge, and to keep functioning in a society where you no longer know who you can trust. The whole novel is written in the simple present, as if you as the reader is actively witnessing the action first-hand, and without too many paragraph breaks which gives it also a sense of urgency.
You can read the novel on two levels (or maybe more), but at least as a perspective change to make us, readers in the Western world experience what it actually means to live in a country like Syria or Afghanistan. Anybody living in those conditions would flee and emigrate to safer and democratic places (Canada in the novel), helping us to have a better sense of empathy with the people who are in this situation today. The second level is of course how fragile our democratic systems are, and once extremists get in power, they will use the democratic system to turn it into a totalitarian autocracy.
The vision is dark, gloomy, but realistic. To me this threat of anti-democratic powers in our societies is the biggest potential problem to our world. If we see what is happening in the United States, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia ... we are near the tipping point to turn our world into full-fledged totalitarianism led by Russia and China. The novel never goes into these larger current geopolitical power plays, but it helps us reflect that his scenario is not impossible, even in a democratic country like the Republic of Ireland.
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