Title: Prophet Song *
Author: Paul Lynch
Rating: 4 stars / 5 stars
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Favorite Quote: “[W]e belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on - the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon…” Lynch, Paul. Prophet Song. Oneworld Publications, 2023, pg. 20.
Review: Congrats to Paul Lynch who won the coveted 2023 Booker Prize for this novel. Prophet Song follows the life of the narrator, Eilish, who, at the novel’s beginning feels a nudge of unease when the police come looking for her husband, and, by the end [SPOILER ALERT], is left with a missing, almost certainly dead husband, missing oldest son, dead middle son, and a barely surviving daughter and infant son. Those who survived the novel’s length are struggling to cross the Irish border into lands that, while not under a dystopian totalitarian regime, still come with their own problems and indignities (see, for instance, the [SPOILER ALERT] corrupt border control agent who seems to want to have alone time with the narrator’s pubescent daughter for, as implied by the text, the exchange of sexual favors for quicker passage across the border.
Oof. Lynch’s talent is in his prose (as, perhaps, is indicated by his having won the Booker Prize), and he manages to create and destroy an entire world in the span of a relatively short novel, exposing how quickly the descent into facism can occur and how the minute shifts towards dystopia can soon lead to the toppling of a once stable, (allegedly) equitable society. Moments in time before Lynch’s novel begin, Lynch’s Ireland is as it is, perhaps now. And by its end, Lynch’s Ireland is in shambles.
Lynch also harnasses his talent for symbolism by mirroring the public deterioration occurring around Eilish with more personal decline, by interspersing the political narrative with moments with Eilish’s father who is in the beginning stages of what appears to be dementia - his forgetfullness and his paranoia existing in a world that is itself falling apart around him.
About that Quote: This quote, fairly early on in the narrative, lays the foundation for what happens in the rest of the novel - a police state infiltrating the schools, the sciences, the hospitals - every aspect of Eilish’s life and every aspect of Irish life.
(Incomplete) List of TWs for Prophet Song: CSA (at least attempted/alluded to), government sanctioned disappearances and deaths, child death, language and violent imagery evocative of brutal, militarist regimes
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