I knew that I was supposed to like Prophet Song, but I found it hard going and unrelenting. Maybe this is part of the point, although I couldn't help sense that its award, of the Booker Prize, reflected more of its "positioning" than its merit. Prophet Song has been compared to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Lynch has been described as "Ireland's Margaret Atwood". Neither analogy is totally unfair, even if tending towards hyperbole. The premise behind Prophet Song is a future Ireland that becomes a totalitarian police state with new laws enacted. A man is taken into custody, never seen again in the course of the novel. Its remainder relates to the struggle faced by his wife to keep the family together. Throughout, the questions posed are: what might you do in a similar situation, and what lengths would you go to in order to protect that close to you? The intensity of the narrative is heightened by Lynch's unbroken prose — very few paragraph breaks, and a stream of (often unrelenting) consciousness. Seven out of ten.
By Paul Lynch