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Summary and Reviews of Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch
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  • First Published:
  • Dec 5, 2023, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Nov 2024, 320 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Exhilarating, terrifying and surprisingly intimate, Prophet Song offers a shocking vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what—or who—is she willing to leave behind?

Excerpt
Prophet Song

The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out onto the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whisper. Tired now, the day almost behind her, all that still has to be done before bed and the children settled in the living room, this feeling of rest for a moment by the glass. Watching the darkening garden and the wish to be at one with this darkness, to step outside and lie down with it, to lie with the fallen leaves and let the night pass over, to wake then with the dawn and rise renewed with the morning come. But the knocking. She hears it pass into thought, the sharp, insistent rapping, each knock possessed so fully of the knocker she begins to frown. Then Bailey too is knocking on the glass door to the kitchen, he calls out to her, Mam, pointing to the hallway without lifting his eyes from the screen. ...

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  • award image

    Booker Prize
    2023

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Lynch understands that totalitarianism doesn't simply storm into power; all too often it creeps in, exploiting minor, seemingly harmless administrative policies and incrementally asphyxiating democratic mores, leaving only the specter of terror as the ruling party, their ambitions unmasked, declares that those who are not with us are against us. As the novel proceeds, readers follow Eilish through a cold Kafkaesque nightmare in which family members can get no information about missing relatives, and residents of the city can only seek the false safety of silence, as dissent is dangerous. Those who enter the prisons and military hospitals do not return, and those who disappear leave no trace...continued

Full Review Members Only (611 words)

(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).

Media Reviews

Daily Mail
While much of the book's sinister power lies in how Lynch hints at the steps by which democracy gives way to totalitarianism, its real energy comes from how he portrays the continuing everyday pressure of Eilishs obligations to her children and frail father amid the deepening turmoil… [A] provocative thought experiment.

Economist
A chilling cautionary tale of war, parenthood and loss. Tender and terrifying.

Guardian
If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, its Paul Lynchs Prophet Song...A brilliant, haunting novel.

Irish Examiner
A tremendous achievement... This is one of the most important novels of 2023. Paul Lynch is a fearless writer – unafraid of taking on large themes and tackling them face to face.

Irish Independent
Eilish is a wonderful creation… Lynch does an excellent job of showing just how swiftly – and plausibly – a society like ours could collapse. Certain sequences read like a thriller – readers will find themselves literally holding their breath – while others are rendered in beautiful, lyrical prose.

Literary Review
Gripping, brilliantly realised... A masterly novel that reminds us that democracy is always fragile.

Sunday Independent (Dublin)
Lynchs writing bristles with tension… While Lynchs novel is a laudable addition to a genre that serves as a warning about how easy it is to lose the freedoms we take for granted, perhaps its greatest achievement is that at no point do the events depicted feel too improbable to be realistic… Prophet Song is entirely original.

The Sunday Times (Ireland)
Lynch renders this almost-Ireland in fluid, poetic prose, moulding sentences as if they were made of plasticine. Its no surprise that since his debut he has been compared with the American writer Cormac McCarthy.

Booklist (starred review)
Irish writer Lynch conveys the creeping horror of a fascist catastrophe in a gorgeous and relentless stream of consciousness illuminating the terrible vulnerability of our loved ones, our daily lives, and social coherence. Eilish muses over the fragility of the body, its rhythms and flows, diseases and defenses. The body politic is just as assailable. A Booker Prize finalist, Lynchs hypnotic and crushing novel tracks the malignant decimation of an open society, a bleak and tragic process we enact and suffer from over and over again.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to [Eilishs] fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthys The Road (2006)...Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.

Publishers Weekly
[T]he momentum of the prose lends an air of portentousness to the narrative...Readers well-versed in the context will find Lynchs vision painfully plausible.

Esi Edugyan, Chair of Judges, The Booker Prize 2023
Lynch pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness... This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave.

Reader Reviews

Donna McEachern

Extraordinary.
After reading four pages, I realized Prophet Song is a book that possesses the reader, so I read it fairly non-stop in two days. First, this is the most disturbing book I’ve read in years. Second, it’s also an intimate portrayal of a country ...   Read More
Jill

Chilling
4.5 star rating Eilish Stack is the main character and the narration in the third person is largely her perspective and her emotions that propel the story from beginning to end. The narrative is told unconventionally, with no paragraph breaks....   Read More
Anthony Conty

Not to Everyone's Taste
“Prophet Song” by Paul Lynch would seem like a novel stunt if many award-winning Irish books did not seem similar. There are not many paragraph breaks and quotation marks here. You get the point of dystopian suffering even when unsure what is ...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



Emergency Powers

In Paul Lynch's novel Prophet Song, the enactment of an Emergency Powers Act sets in motion a sequence of destabilizing events that will eventually lead to societal dissolution and civil war. The Act provides the legal justification for an authoritarian government, through its newly formed secret police force and military, to bypass normal protections and institute human rights violations against its own citizens under the guise of national security measures. Throughout the novel, characters question how it is possible that an elected government in a democratic country such as Ireland can ignore the constitution in hammering its crushing new restrictions into place.

American readers may also find themselves reflecting on how ...

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