Prophet Song
Ratings85
Average rating4
This is a heavy, heavy story, and it took me a while to get through.
It is brilliant, challenging, and emotionally raw.
I loved Prophet Song. It is a must read especially relevant to society today.
It is a heartbreaking read. Very tough and thought provoking.
I wanted to love this. I think taking taking the story of individuals impacted by a war-torn country and placing it in a “Western Country” is a brilliant way to break the complacency that can come with reading similar, real stories in the news. Of course, the rise of authoritarian governments also makes this a little too timely. However, the strange formatting added nothing for me and detracted from the book. At first it did add to the frenetic pace, but it did make it feel jumbled in the middle and like I missed some important details and prose. It worked well to sit up the beginning slow creep and the frenetic pace of the ending, but was also an impediment.
I read this book in fewer sittings than I had anticipated. Going back to its first page now and re-sounding its aptly rendered epigrams have nudged me in seeing how.
Perhaps the writer, I thought, initially anticipated and situated the ‘darkness', being ‘sensed' or felt, taking over the landscape and everything inside it, a bit too much; but it never took too long for the story to accompany the reader, who starts moving along the subsequent narrative progression.
Prophet Song starts with that feeling... the night darkness envelops or takes everything one by one – and brings that with it which is simply understood as the presence that overtakes the rest – or has always been there.
“This feeling that came into the house has followed.”
Paul Lynch deserves an earnest read for the effort he's been able to put in sensitizing the central character, disallowing it to enter any sentimentalized loops, and yet carving the hand of a tale that hits, as it must, at the right place. In that capacity, this book is a story of our times, and a story for everyone; people who actually constitute society, countries, institutions, states-and-their-constitutions, and ultimately history.
Thanks to the dedicatedly invested narrative focus on the character of Mrs. Eilish Stack, the reader is enabled to delve into the suffering of an upright human being. The near nauseating atmosphere, is also liberating in the way of seeing us, or the ones of the many of our fellow ‘privileged' inhabitants on the planet, to have turned away from the others' suffering, more often than could be deemed common...
“Something inchoate within her knowledge has spoken...”, only to transform into “some inchoate feeling of death, of victory and slaughter in vast numbers, of history laid under the feet of the vanquisher...”.
At its most vulnerable self, suffering through her body and mind, Eilish shows unbelievable resilience, which is testament to what the human self is worth, and which is why our policy makers must attest to it beyond their rhetorical word speak. Else, we are working day and night in speeding towards manifesting the author's deepest concerns legitimizing the thought that,
“History is a silent record of people who didn't know when to leave ... a silent record of people who could not leave”.
Wow.
It took me a minute to sink into the third person present PoV and the lack of paragraphs and dialogue marks and the certain Irishness of the prose. And then ... suddenly ... I found myself swept away by this fevered dream of a mother struggling to scrape out a bit of sanity in an insane and tragic world, mama-bearing her way through as best she can.
Wow.
You have never read a story like this and will never again. I highly, highly recommend this.
Wow.
...
Oh, by the way, this won the Booker Prize in 2023.
It was Animal Farm from the beginning and for the amount of time I have to reread a page, Paul Lynch got shy and included a space on each word. I'm not the best audience for this book.
While I don't love the Booker Longlist this year, I do love that it made me read this book. And in a year where I read Demon Copperhead, this may be the most traumatic yet. Made more so by watching what is happening in Israel and Gaza.
