Prophet Song - Paul Lynch

 "and it is grief that seizes hold of her when she sees her children abandoned, seeing how she was told and did not listen, it was your duty to deliver them from danger but instead you stood your ground, such foolishness and blindness before the facts, you should have got them out, hearing the words her father gave in warning again and again, to leave the country and make a better life, seeing the missed opportunities grow before her and how they could have escaped, all of it dust, all of it a nothingness in a false past and she sees herself in a hole in the earth"

I have read a few Dystopian novels -  not a lot. But never has a book scared my living wits as this one. Probably because of its gradual progress to horror. From a polite visit by two detectives to talk to the teacher/ unionist father/husband, to where children are taken from hospital without the knowledge of their parents, the impression that is conveyed to the reader is that 'living hell' is not too far away. As things grew worse for the citizens they are left without any responses from the state and its mechanisms, while life gets difficult with each day. It is like creeping death. And creeping death can catch you if you happen to be born at the wrong time at the wrong country.

“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,”

As a novel it wastes little time in fleshing up its key characters - for instance we don't know Larry's past, or Eilish', or about into their personal lives (there's a passing reference to getting a new mattress upstairs and the subsequent fun they had, early into their marriage ) - what am trying to say is the novel has the detail of everyday mundane life of a family with children, how they sense a threat to it, they await till is passes, and all of a sudden its too late, and there's only regret. And then the characters realize that that the mundane were the happiest times of their lives.

Not sure how much its contemporary political message played in the big awards it managed to grab, but for its credit the book never gave a sense of being contrived, and as mentioned above, the reader too hopes that the threat will go away - until it doesn't - and its too late.

A most excellently crafted, ghastly work ! The near perfect horror that the author brings is the success of this novel

Rating : ****1/2
Booker Award for 2023 - Winner