A review by sandrinepal
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

 This came out of left field for me: I didn't expect to love it as much as I did. I think in part I was accidentally a great demographic for it at this particular point in time. Let me count the ways...
☑ I just finished reading a small mountain of books about Latin American governments in the 20th century, including Jonathan Blitzer's Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, so I was primed to empathize with the chaos of authoritarianism, extrajudicial disappearances, and torture.
☑ I also just took a couple of graduate credits' worth of courses on Northern Ireland's Troubles, so Eilish's day-to-day struggle with checkpoints, restrictions, and employment discrimination felt eerily familiar and realistic.
☑ Last, but certainly not least, my country (France) has seen a steep rise of the far right. It recently culminated in congressional elections earlier this summer. During the campaign, some of the prospects being debated were sweeping changes to the constitution, should the nationalist party come to power (which, thankfully, they did not).
☑ Oh, and did I mention I have a teenage son and an increasingly dependent aging parent?

So... yeah.

This is one of those books where I went searching for people's reactions after I finished reading it. It affected me so deeply that I felt the need to find kindred spirits. I won't dwell on it too much, but I was disappointed in many reviewers' reactions. Some argue that the book is not dystopian enough, that it doesn't live up to the golden standards of the genre, like 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale. I disagree, in part because I don't think Prophet Song purports to be dystopian: I found it chillingly realistic, from cover to cover, which is partly why I'm giving it 5 stars. Many readers also complained about the opacity of the style (no dialogue punctuation? Egads!) I found it a very effective style for evoking Eilish's mounting confusion and distress.

Are there a few passages that are a little too florid? Maybe. But for me, overall, this was a Ken-Loach-award-winning-film of a book and I will recommend it to just about anyone who will listen.