Reviewed by Teri Takle
Families can be complicated. For Eilish Stack, having a full-time job as a scientist, and having a husband, four children, and an aging father is often overwhelming, but she feels competent in her abilities. Purhase Here.
Her husband works as a trade unionist and frequently faces opposition, even from the government.
The characterization is phenomenal. The reader becomes Eilish as she struggles to keep her family and their everyday life together while she questions what is happening around her.
The structural aspect of Prophet Song is disturbing. There are no paragraphs and no quotation marks. This style abnormality becomes troubling to read, but it perfectly parallels what is happening in Eilish’s life. She is trying to save her family because she has to choose what is most important for her family..
The purpose of any novel is to teach the reader another perspective, another insight. Prophet Song unquestionably deserved the Booker Prize last year. The writing is clear and vivid, placing the reader in the protagonist’s shoes. You feel like you are Eilish and wonder what is best for you and your family.
Prophet Song is dystopian fiction at its best. You think, almost become haunted by the characters’ circumstances, wondering how you would act if this happened to you.
Paul Lynch is an Irish author who has won numerous prizes worldwide for his previous novels.
His choice of setting Prophet Song in Ireland is brilliant.
Some of my favorite bits of wisdom from this book are, “…seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again,” along with ” the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, 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…”
Prophet Song is disturbing, a must-read, a haunting tale that leaves the reader reevaluating what is essential in their life and what becomes their breaking point. What will you do?