Last year’s Booker Winner Prophet Song has been on my radar to read ever since it was longlisted last year. Typically, I have only got around to buying myself a copy recently.
I thought it was an incredibly powerful novel, hugely thought-provoking too, to the extent that I found myself thinking about it even while I wasn’t actually reading it. It’s a dystopian novel, chillingly told – of a society on the brink. It’s rather depressing, truth be told, because these things or things very like it have already happened in countries such as Syria – only here the country is Ireland – and suddenly we can see ourselves in these events and the view is rather terrifying. It’s so easy to imagine that such things take place in other places far removed from Western Europe, America, Canada etc – if we choose to be complacent (and many of us do not, at all) we could feel safe from such terror – but should we? Having said that – I just couldn’t stop reading, or thinking about it.
“and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore,”
Most reviews I have seen of this novel state that it is set in a near future Ireland, although in an interview I saw with the author on YouTube he insisted that nowhere in the novel is the period revealed – which is the case, I don’t know what to take from that, as I had assumed that it was set in the near future. Certainly this is a very recognisable world, a world of ordinary suburban houses, families juggling work, children and household tasks.
Much has probably already been said about the style of this novel. It is written in large blocks of text with no paragraphs and no speech marks. I would say don’t let that put you off – I know not everyone likes that kind of style. There are frequent page breaks – every three or four pages which I think help make the look of the text less dauntingly dense. However, I didn’t find this a difficult book to read at all – I found the style lends itself to the compelling nature of the story, and the poetic, brilliant language is a real pleasure to read. The author never allows us to become confused in who is speaking and the whole narrative flows beautifully and uninterruptedly to its conclusion. I enjoyed the rhythm of the language and I can absolutely see why it won the Booker.
From the outset this is a heartstopping story. It begins on a wet Dublin evening, when Ellish Stack, a scientist and mother of four is brought to the front door. Two officers from the GNSB, Ireland’s newly formed secret police, ask to speak to her husband, a teacher and trade unionist. Ireland has recently undergone great change, a new government is driving the country toward tyranny. Everything familiar is slowly starting to disappear. First her husband disappears – vanished into a silent, secret world, others in the country are also starting to disappear. Protests are quickly and often brutally quashed. People at work begin to look at Ellish differently, it might not be safe to discuss certain topics over the phone, the state now controls the TV news. Ellish tries to shield her children from the reality of what is happening but it quickly becomes apparent that she can’t – her older children, around sixteen, fourteen and twelve (there’s also a baby) can’t help but be affected by the atmosphere around them, their mother’s fear – their father’s absence, the curfew and their favourite foods disappearing from the shops. Her daughter Molly becomes frightened and silent, her son Bailey begins to wet the bed – his rage is a white hot fury of confusion and terror. As her eldest son Mark nears his seventeenth birthday there is another fear – that her bright, ambitious boy will be forced to join the army, Ellish decides to hide him, enlisting the help of another woman who’s husband has also disappeared. However, Mark decides to join the rebel forces fighting to overthrow the government – and he too disappears into a world of silence and fighting.
Ellish’s elderly father lives nearby, he seems to be in the early stages of some unspecified dementia, but he has sudden moments of clear sighted clarity – but his vulnerabilities give Ellish someone else to worry about as he refuses to go to live with her and the children. We sense the world watching events unfold, holding its breath, shaking its head in disbelief. Ellish’s sister in Canada, urges her to flee – sending a large sum of money to help bribe her family’s way out of the country. However, Ellish can’t bear to leave her husband and eldest son behind her – insists on believing that things can’t stay like this for long – not in her country.
“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.”
It becomes clear that the country is becoming more and more divided. More and more people proudly wear the badge of the ruling party showing where their allegiances lie – while others protest or send their sons to join the rebels. Many people hide in their homes, listening to the battle for freedom going on above their heads, in suburban communities of Ireland – it is almost unimaginable. Only, it isn’t really, we have seen it all before – and we see how quickly fear encourages people to turn away from who they used to be, creating division and suspicion everywhere.
“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.”
I don’t want to say too much more about the actual plot – but it is quite the rollercoaster – and this ordinary family is changed forever in ways hard to imagine. I thought this was a quite brilliant novel – and I am so glad I finally got around to reading it.
heavenali 