First, a caveat: I am not in the literati, I don’t know how books get awards and neither do I care for “high” literature. I read books for fun, end of.
That being said, this book was needlessly a chore and the definition of an overwritten book if ever there was the need to define one. I understand that the format, pace and tone this book takes is part of its method of getting its ideas across. It drones on and repeats itself to give a sense of the tedium in a totalitarian country sliding into a civil war. Fair. I can forgive the blocks of paragraphs, but can you at least write believable characters?
I think that when a book breaks format to get something across, it must accompany that with -at a minimum- good characterisation. The blocks of paragraphs that drone should not be of a story of flat characters in a setting the author hasn’t bothered to build in any useful way. Alain Mabanckou’s *Boken Glass* is barely punctuated but you build empathy with the narrator because they walk you through the world in a believable way, ditto James Hannaham’s *Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta*. The reason these books still cohere in their narration is that the characters they create are credible in their actions. Sure, reading unpunctuated rambling sentences can be difficult, but as a reader, I can forgive that because Broken Glass is a drunk man – drunk people slur and don’t particularly punctuate when they speak. The form fits the character and the narration coheres. Not so in Prophet Song.
Every single character in Prophet Song is flat. Including the narrator. All of them. The husband is an idealist, the wife a stubborn passive mother on whom life just happens over and over, the toddler is toddling, and the older children are rebellious. Roses are red and water is wet.
If we are to take this novel as a commentary on the complicity of neighbours in totalitarianism – on how civil wars begin slowly, then all at once, or on the meaning of leaving home, or whatever…pick a theme – is the novel seriously arguing that there are people who go through such radical changes around them and remain completely passive and with no survival instinct whatsoever? And the best medium to make this argument was a well-educated mother married to a trade union activist?
Why not use all the characters Eilish interacts with to paint a picture of those thematics?
Instead, even the neighbours are boring characters who either are very radical against the regime or they are simply complicit without an opinion of their own. Adherents to ruling parties in totalitarian regimes don’t simply wear party lapel pins and wave flags and are happy to live and let live. Complicit neighbours are never content to have a traitor to their cause simply living next door and going through life with a civil war raging, Northern Ireland still has peace walls to this day.
Some of the first to kill in political, religious, or ethnic strife are the neighbours next door. Elish can get on a bicycle and ride across town unscathed? This novel would have us suspend belief and imagine that the only engine that brooks no opposition is the state and its agents.
Finally, as this book is set in Ireland, can you imagine the scene during the troubles in which one crosses the town to go to hospital behind enemy lines?
The novel is dull just to be dull, getting rid of paragraphs and quotation marks does not make it a classic.
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by handsakimbo