Don't ask me to elaborate on this but this book wouldn't be the same without the corona virus pandemic. In fact, I don't think it would have been writDon't ask me to elaborate on this but this book wouldn't be the same without the corona virus pandemic. In fact, I don't think it would have been written at all had the pandemic never existed. It's just a feeling I had while I was reading it. Don't be fooled though. It's not a book about the pandemic or any pandemic for that matter. Yet, it has everything to do with it.
So what is it about? It's about watching your life, your family, your environment, everything you've ever known gradually come apart from one day to the next. It's about what you thought would never happen to you, things you've always considered as occurences in far away places, suddenly all coming upon you. It's about the priviledged becoming runaways in a national scale. It would be interesting to know what people who are hostile towards refugees would feel reading Prophet's Song. What kind of idiotic defence mechanisms would pop up inside them. What kind of strongholds would crumble to the ground.
Paul Lynch's words are like rain falling on your unprotected skin. A rain not exactly cold but not warm either. The kind of words that leave you with a stupefied frown on your face as you read them. Page by page you feel the darkness seeping into your mind through every open pore. And just when you think that there must be some end to it, that there must be some glimmer of hope in all this, it only becomes worse. In Greek Mythology hope was one of the evils stored inside Pandora's jar and, according to one version of the story, it was the one that didn't flee with the others when Pandora removed the lid. Instead, it remained inside, available forever to all humans to turn to in their time of need. In situations like those described in the novel, one can see the point behind the myth. In such situations hope can be a real son of a bitch.
Prophet's Song is one of those books that cut, stab and wound, like Kafka once wrote. It's not pleasant nor easy to read but what great piece of literature ever was? And yet, in the end it leaves you with the feeling of life's might and how it must go on and how there's always some light lingering here and there and how it must, by all means, stay on....more
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