Book Bites: Prophet Song

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prophet Song is the most affecting book I've read in quite some time. Too often reviews throw around words like "haunting" but here the descriptor fits. Lynch's writing is masterful; brutal and lyric, every page leaping with perfect sentences that stab straight through the heart of truth.

"Happiness hides in the humdrum, 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."

Lynch puts his reader in the role of helpless bystander as fascism infects the government of modern-day Ireland. Through our narrator, mother of four Eilish, we watch in disbelief as evil takes root. Everyone says "it couldn't possibly happen here" until it does. What starts with kids' schooling and fretting over what to make for dinner gives way to political prisoners, the approaching march of war and refugees' struggles for freedom. 

At every turn, the reader waits for the book to follow fiction's usual trajectory, for a hero to rise up and smite evil, only to be reminded that real evil cares little for our rules of fiction.

Prophet Song is an instant classic, demanding to be read and re-read. It tolls the bell, warning its readers how precious and fragile freedom truly is.


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