Book Review: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
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About the book
A mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism.
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart.
The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.
Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times.
Find it in this month's Irish Authors Book Box
Why we love it
I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting to love this one. I've been putting it off for ages, assuming it might not be quite my cup of tea. I was wrong. It is exactly my cup of tea. Smart, relevant, character-driven and just so utterly brilliant.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Prophet Song is, without doubt, one of the best books I've read all year. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. It was a forget work, let's just read this book all day kind of moment.
The story follows Eilish and her family as they struggle to adapt and stay together in a world that's collapsing around them. Ireland is transforming day-by-day into a totalitarian police state, with neighbours, friends, family and colleagues all turning against each other as the country descends into civil war.
The most striking thing about the book is that all feels far too believable and recognisable. Each small, insidious erosion of justice and civil liberties is almost unnoticed by the general population. Easy to ignore until the day it isn't, until the day you're the one that's impacted and forced to realise that the rules of the game have changed and you didn't notice.
As Paul Lynch writes, "the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house".
And yet, even with catastrophe knocking at her door, Eilish remains hopeful that if she can just keep her family together, it'll all be ok and the world will go back to normal. It's her emotional journey through the book which makes it such a powerfully intimate story.
I should note that the book is written without paragraph or line breaks which some readers have struggled with. For me though, it added to the atmosphere of the novel, creating a breathless sense of events spiralling out of control with Eilish and her family dragged along in the undertow.
With so much conflict and violence in the world at the moment, Prophet Song is a timely reminder that end of the world events are never far from our doorstep.
A completely unmissable and unputdownable book that everyone should read.
