Holy crap, this is an amazing book. I kinda feel like it’s been done—family at the outbreak of society’s collapse/civil war, or stream of consciousness, or modern family in dystopian times—but it also has not been done. For one, the maternal perspective in Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is pitch perfect, intimate, and novel (hard to believe he is not a mother, actually). Also, it’s like hero-meets-antihero because everyone is so real. It is a bleak read (a word that gets used to describe this book a lot). Brutal, even. But it is also contemplative and important. And the language is beautiful, if perhaps over-shooting it sometimes. I kinda read this book on a whim when I saw that it won the Booker Prize last year, but I am so glad I picked it up.

It might be the future or it might be right now, but it’s definitely Ireland and it looks a lot like our current world. Until Eilish’s husband goes missing and we start catching little clues around every corner. There has been some strife in politics, leaving a party in power that is predisposed to overreach their authority. And since Eilish’s husband worked for the people and worker’s rights, he is first in line for questioning and incarceration. But people don’t yet understand what is happening, and as each new atrocity begins, engulfing her baby, teen children, senile father, neighbors and co-workers, as well as her rights and sense of normalcy, how does she respond to that which she cannot confirm? To that which she doesn’t know or understand? Caught between the painfully slow slide of a democracy into something else and her normal life as a scientist, daughter, and mother, Eilish sometimes has to make decisions before she’s even noticed there is a decision to make… and then live with the often-terrible consequences.

So, I added to the Best-Ofs List: 2020s, at the end of 2023. Mostly, I added some amalgamated top-ten lists. And then I thought, well what about the big prize winners? I added those to the list too, and even inserted them into my 2024 pipe-dream TBR at a rate of one a month. For some reason, Prophet Song was the first one to plop onto January, having won the Booker Prize in 2023. I mean, I hadn’t heard that much about it, though. I mean, it wasn’t on all the best-ofs list for the year. I hadn’t noticed it at all the bookstores. I mean, it was no Lessons in Chemistry. But 2023 was pleasantly-surprisingly chock full of great books and recommendations and enthusiastic readers. There were bound to be more great books from 2023 than I could read in a year’s time.

I didn’t start out loving Prophet Song, or even appreciating it. First, the cover struck me as lackluster and the title, well kinda off-putting. I mean, the title sounds like it could be a few different things, but none of those impressions were Irish, stream-of-consciousness, literary, dystopian, mom lit. And then I started reading. Sigh. I think that one of the main reasons series have become so popular is that beginning a new book with a new voice and a new setting and a new tone takes work. And when an author is doing something, say, experimental or even just rare, it makes starting even more work. Prophet Song is literary to the core. It is told in first person stream-of-consciousness. It is also present tense. It also lacks usual grammar in many aspects. There are periods and capital letters, occasional paragraph breaks and even chapter breaks, a random comma, but besides that, even some of the possessive and contraction apostrophes are missing, let alone all the usual periods and commas and whatnot. I understand why you would use run-on sentences and play with verbs and things if you are trying to inhabit Eilish’s head, sometimes stating things in interrupted thoughts and innovative phraseology or, how would I say this?, misused words (in a way we all must use whichever word creates the most meaning in our thoughts and then cast it off). But no quotations marks? Why no paragraph breaks where they would usually be? I had a hard time accepting that a little more clarity would mess with the mood and stream-of-consciousness of the book, since it would have made it much easier to read. In fact, I’m sure many people begin to read the book and are like nah. Way too much work. Personally, I moaned and then I got used to it. I would say I even grew to appreciate the choices. But I do think Lynch could have pulled back on the bizzarro-reigns just a little bit, making it easier to settle into, and yet retaining its intimacy and reality. Do I think Lynch should have given in to some conventions to make it more accessible? Yes, I do. Could he still have been innovative and created the same mood? Yes, I think he could have, just with a little lowering of his pinky on the teacup.

This book would be great for teaching in either literature/writing or in history. While it is alternate history/dystopia, the story is also both the distillation of the experience of millions (?) of people throughout history and a warning-bell for the future. I couldn’t help thinking, “Well, I’m glad I’ve read this book, because if this sort of thing starts happening around me, maybe I’ll have some insight.” And it’s not hard to believe this would happen to me, soon, in this country. But then there is also the dimension of this book being great literature. The Scottish and Irish writers seem to be throwing a lot of slam dunks lately, but this writing is amazing. It’s lyrical. And surprising. And deep. And creative. And artistically beautiful. The plot is slow and, in some ways, unconventional (in that literary-not-seven-point way), but the tension is incredibly tight and even. The characters are complicated, well-drawn, and sympathetic. And talk about themes! You could sit around in a book club circle and talk about this book for hours, just based on theme alone. What is Lynch saying? Who is right? Who is wrong? Where have we seen this before? Where is it happening now? Could it happen to us? How would I react? Did Eilish respond how any family woman would have to? Were her feet “rooted,” as she asserts at one point? How do everyone’s perspectives change as more about their reality unfolds? Was it possible for them to predict what would happen? How could they have changed their outcomes?

Anyway, this was a grind, because the characters are being ground ruthlessly by the wheels of politics and the mechanisms of power as lived out in the lives of the normal Joes of society. Like I said, it is bleak and brutal, but it is also beautiful and powerful and important. I know that not everyone is going to pick up this book or make it through this book, and yet I keep recommending it to those who I think might. Because it is a great book and it deserves to be read and celebrated.

I can’t do much better than what it says on Lynch’s website about the book: “Exhilarating, terrifying, and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of societal collapse and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.”

Paul Lynch is still fairly young, but has been publishing to critical acclaim since his first novel in 2013, Red Sky in Morning. His other books are The Black Snow, Grace, and Beyond the Sea. I don’t know how I can’t be curious about his other books at this point. All of them were widely lauded, they just hadn’t crossed my radar, so much. He has lived a very normal life, in Ireland, with two kids and a divorce, having not graduated from college, and been a film critic before becoming a writer. Yet, somehow, in that lack of fanfare, genius was growing.

“She checks herself then, almost laughing, this universal reflex of guilt when the police call to your door” (p2).

“…but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on—the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts…” (p20).

“…if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying It over and over people accept it as true—this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book” (p21).

“Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself, he says, you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales…” (p21).

“I would rather die than see his absence parading all day in front of the children” (p40).

“…the words leave the mouth and the mind follows after the words and some sense of understanding is made” (p48).

“Memory lies, it plays its own games, layers one image upon another that might be true or not true, over time the layers dissolve and become like smoke, watching the smoke that blows out her mouth vanish into the day” (p72).

“Soon he will walk and then he will run and the hand that pulls on the hand of the mother is the hand that will pull to let go” (p95).

“I wish you would listen to me, Aine says, history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave” (p103).

“There is memory in weather” (p136).

“…she sat with Larry and felt the quickening of the child that would be Mark, the first flutterings as though the child were growing wings to take flight from inside her” (p137).

“…something breaks inside the man who learns he could not protect his family, it will be best if he doesn’t know” (p140).

“They are calling it an insurgency on the international news, Molly says, but if you want to give war its proper name, call it entertainment, we are now TV for the rest of the world” (p160).

“…if he’s not false then it is the world that is false, there is always someone else to blame” (p164).

“…the dust laying itself down upon the years of their lives, the years of their lives slowly turning to dust…” (p176).

“…it is as though she were looking out upon something she had been waiting for all her life, an atavism awakened in the blood, thinking, how many people across how many lifetimes have watched upon war bearing down on their home…” (p182).

“History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet” (p185).

“”…this is not the news, this is not the news at all, the news is the civilian watching the soldier outside her home and he lolls on a sandbag playing with his phone, the news is the assault rifle resting against the sandbag” (p189).

“…a youth who stands alone at the junction and looks as though he is awaiting command to place his weapon down and go to school…” (p193).

“We have entered into a tunnel and there is no going back, she says, we just need to keep going and going until we reach the light on the other side” (p197).

“…you never lose, you either learn or win…” (p197).

“…he will always be here because the love we are given when we are loved as a child is stored forever inside us …. his love fo you cannot be taken away nor erased, please don’t ask me to explain this, you just need to believe it is true because it is so, it is a law of the human heart” (p198).

“…seeing how they have made an end of death by meeting it with death” (p202).

“…one moment you are pruning trees and the next you are an improvised ambulance driver, wondering what it is the man will do with this when he tries to sleep tonight, watching the small child with the face full of shrapnel he helped carry into the van, watching it replay in his mind for the rest of his life” (p245).

“…she closes her eyes and cannot think what to do, the heart has grown too sick for thinking, the heart now in a cage” (p276).

“There should be nothing on the other side but the edge of a cliff that begins the long fall down into nothingness but instead the road continues past the border…” (p286).

“…I don’t see how free will is possible when you are caught up within such a monstrosity, one thing leads to another things until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do…” (p302).

“…wishing for the world its destruction…” (p304).

“…it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life…” (p304).

“…the end of the world is always a local event…” (p304).

I can’t imagine doing this book justice as a movie or TV series. It would make a good movie or series, actually, but the movie couldn’t be better than the book, nor could it really capture the soul of this book, which is necessarily bound to the language. Just sayin’.