If someone had told me there was an author who made Sally Rooney’s no-quotation-mark style look ordinary, I would’ve laughed. But then I read Prophet Song, and realized Paul Lynch is on a completely different level. Not only does he skip quotation marks, he barely uses paragraphs.
So what is this story actually about?
Prophet Song follows Eilish Stack, a scientist and mother of four, whose normal, comfortable life slowly breaks apart. She and her husband, Larry, who works for Ireland’s teachers’ union, live on the outskirts of Dublin, even planning an Easter trip. Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door. Two officers appear, their faces half-covered, asking for Larry.
From this point on, the world around Eilish begins to shift like a slow, creeping dread that gets under your skin.
The tension in this story grows gradually that frustrated me. Ireland starts slipping into authoritarianism, and every day feels a little more unstable. What struck me most is how real it all feels. This doesn’t read like a distant dystopia.
In my view, Eilish herself often feels painfully naïve. She keeps convincing herself that things aren’t “that bad,” even when her father tries to tell her the truth. Even her son, Mark, understands the severity long before she does. When he says there’s no law left in the land, it’s blunt, but he’s right. And I think he’s right again when he tells her she’s in denial. Eilish refuses to look directly at what’s happening, and somehow that makes the story even more heartbreaking.
Lynch’s writing style is a huge part of this experience. The long, unbroken passages create a sense of breathlessness. You’re trapped alongside Eilish, trying to understand something that keeps getting worse. And maybe that’s the point: Lynch doesn’t want us to watch a society collapse from the outside. He wants us to feel it.
Looking at the current situation around the world, Prophet Song doesn’t feel dystopian in the traditional sense. It feels disturbingly realistic.
My Favorite Bits
- “We are both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition 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, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, 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.”
- 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.
Author: Paul Lynch
Publication date: 24 August 2023
Number of pages: 259 pages
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