'Prophet Song': A Dystopian Masterpiece for Our Times

Irish literature

‘Prophet Song’ has been on my shelf since it won the Booker Prize in 2023! Some readers advised me to read it only if I’m experiencing the bright days of my life. I listened to them and waited, but who knows when those bright days will come? After finishing ‘Kairos,’ the International Booker Prize winner of 2024, I needed to read something equally good and contemporary. And, yes, I know I have a thing for

The Booker Prizes

winners!😅

I started reading ‘Prophet Song,’ and I was like, "Wow, breathtaking!” The first thing that caught my eye was the similarity between some fictional dystopian events and the things that actually happened in my country two years ago.

Ok, let’s go back to the book! ‘Prophet Song’ is a dystopian novel set in a near-future Ireland. The story follows Eilish Stack, a mother determined to protect her family as their country descends into totalitarianism.

Eilish faces terrible events, and as an educated and successful woman, she must choose whether to mourn her family, torn apart, or stay strong and keep the remaining part together. She is the perfect picture of the modern woman. She has a PhD and works as a scientist. She’s a wife, a mother of four, and a dutiful daughter caring for her elderly father, who is losing his memory to Alzheimer’s.

She sees everything falling apart before her eyes, and the only thing she can do is stay strong and take care of her family. Paul Lynch, as the god of this book’s world, couldn’t be more restrictive and unfair to her! I know, It’s part of his dark story, but still, we expect god to be more kind!

As the story makes us admire her strength, in some parts, the author plays with our judgmental minds and makes us think, well, if she had done things differently, their family might have had a different destiny. This is the interesting part of his writing power—depicting a real character with faults and good parts.

The story is fast-paced and suspenseful, keeping you on the edge of your seat. It’s fantastic that you can expect something new till the last page of the book. To some readers, the novel's lack of punctuation and paragraphs can be challenging, but for me, it was interesting, and I enjoyed it.

To me, the whole story is about the unpredictability of life. About how real life is in the simple events of the day while we are waiting for something special to happen to celebrate our life, as Eilish thinks:

She sees how happiness hides in the humdrum, how it abides in the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should not be seen, as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past.

And the fact that we have to accept unwanted events and try to find a new way through life:

“I think what I'm trying to say is that I used to believe in free will. If you had asked me before all this, I would have told you I was free as a bird, but now I'm not so sure. Now, I don't see how free will is possible when you are caught up within such a monstrosity. One thing leads to another thing until the damn thing has its own momentum, and there is nothing you can do. I can see now that what I thought of as freedom was really just struggle and that there was no freedom all along.”

“We are here now, aren't we? And so many other people are gone. We're the lucky ones seeking a better life. There is only looking forward now, isn't that right? Perhaps there is a little freedom to be found in that thought because at least you can make the future your own in your thoughts. If we keep looking back, we will die in a way, and there is still some living to be done.”

And for closure, this is the lesson for us to think about:

“And she looks at her infant son, this child who remains an innocent, and she sees how she has fallen afoul of herself and grows aghast, seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love, and out of love, the world can be redeemed again. She can see that the world does not end, that 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, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time: the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight. The prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another, and that 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 becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”

If we consider “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” the most important books in dystopian literature, I would say “Prophet Song” is the new book on this shelf!

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