Prophet Song—2023 Booker Prize winner—is a heart-wrenching novel set in an Ireland where law and order is unravelling. A government oozing authoritarianism has enacted the Emergencies Act and is rounding up dissenters. Rebel forces are trying to regain control but the government has the upper hand and is using every measure possible to obscure from the world what is actually happening.
Eilish is caught up in the political turmoil when her union-leader husband disappears and her eldest son, only 17, runs away to join the rebel forces. She is a working mom with 3 other children at home and she is denied a passport for the baby. Her father has dementia and gets lost in his own home. There are so many reasons for her not to leave when given the chance. Indeed it doesn’t feel like a chance at all.
The magic of this novel is in its discomforting truths about unrest in Western democracies and where it leads.
The saddler’s is closed and the shutters are down on the fruit and veg shop where somebody has scrawled in blue paint HiSTOrY iS THE LAW OF FOrCE, a fist drawn beside it. She follows the road seeking another ATM, recalling something her sister said, the self-satisfied voice on the phone, history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave, the statement is obviously false … 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.
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Prophet Song is a dark novel about the pain of loss and separation, and I can’t help but think of the lines of women pushing baby buggies of belongings into Poland, migrants and refugees risking death in dinghies, whole neighbourhoods being bombed into submission and pushed into so-called “safe zones”— I felt immense empathy for those trapped by circumstance in the chaos of modern times. This is not some future or past too hard to bring to mind.