Prophet Song

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”.