Prophet Song
About the book
Author: Paul Lynch
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.
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Bookshop.org (print)
My Review
Prophet Song won the 2023 Booker Prize, but also got lots of mixed reviews from my reader friends, so I went into it hesitantly but intrigued. I landed on the slightly positive side of neutral: I didn’t hate it, but it’s far from a new favorite.
You may know that this book is about a dystopian Ireland that descends into a totalitarian government state and open war (much like many actual global conflicts that have happened throughout history outside of Europe and the US). It’s told from the POV of a mother trying to hold her family together in a tight, claustrophobic style — there are no paragraph breaks or even quotation marks.
Somehow, this book is completely engrossing and also felt sooooo slow to me. I had to set timers in the Forest app to keep from scrolling on my phone. Whether that was subject-matter aversion or the book’s prose just not hooking me (or both), I’m not sure. I also found the main character frustrating.
But at the end of the day, this is a devastating, scary, very moving book that absolutely achieves what it sets out to. In that sense, the book works. I only wish that Western audiences didn’t need books like this to be set in their home countries in order to wake up as much to these kinds of atrocities. I think Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris, which is set in the Syrian Civil War, is an even better example of this kind of book.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Death of one’s child
Torture
War and violence
Abduction
