When I happened to read the news regarding Paul Lynch winning the 2023 Booker Prize for his book, Prophet Song, I just read the blurb of the book out of curiosity. I was immediately piqued by the blurb which read as follows -
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.
How far will she go to save her family? And what - or who - is she willing to leave behind?
Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.
I have always been fascinated by dystopian scenarios which are set in the near future as they seem to be more plausible than pure-play science fiction. What makes such scenarios fascinating is how close they hit home, how real they seem and how clearly possible they seem with world events unfolding the way they are in real life today. And wow, this book hits hard and how, what with all the right wing fundamentalist governments coming to power all over the world. This book clearly captures the impact of such totalitarian and authoritarian regimes on the lives of ordinary citizens living in these countries.
What however hit me harder about this book was the fact that the author chose to narrate the overall proceedings through the eyes of the protagonist, Eilish Stack. Without giving away any spoilers, what starts off as a dystopian novel quickly becomes more of a struggle for Eilish maintaining her and her family's sanity through the overall grim proceedings through the pages of the novel.
This novel is not for the weak of heart or for readers who are stickler to grammar rules. The style in which the author writes - completely ignoring standard practices such as usage of paragraphs as logical breaks, usage of quotes for spoken dialogues, usage of chapters to give breaks in the narrative, all of these make the narrative a little hard to follow as readers are left wondering who said what versus who thought what and so on. That being said, this quirky way of writing also serves to immerse the readers into the happenings a little more than a conventional book does. I was slowly but surely pulled into Eilish's world unconsciously by having to figure out what she was voicing out loud as against what she was thinking.
All in all, a good read, especially for me given that I am back to reading books after a good 5+ year hiatus.
