Harsimran kaur ON Feb 20, 2024, IN BOOK REVIEW, Prophet Song By Paul Lynch – Fiction
Rating: 5/5
The inseparable need to be with darkness craves unison with the unattempted liberties; if the light does throw a tantrum, the austerity negotiates with the self in sarcasm to let the anomaly play a vengeance with the poignancy of left-overs.
Ask yourself, has darkness ever forgiven the corrugated folds of the skin or the befalling eyes tricked by visibility? Recall those tears pressed against the palm of the hands losing their virginity impregnated by hollowness; does the dark robe ever protect them from not falling? How we often make a delusionary tart of the thoughts juxtaposed to darkness; we fight a crusade of presumptions under the dark prolapse in bonhomie with the fatigue embedded in the slippery dawn?
The darkest of the dark hour leaves us not! Do we finally lose ourselves under the dark sky? Or are eager for the beacon of light to fall protectively to make a new song? Can the coal-lighted firmament align us to where we belong? Belonging, yes!—the final cul de sac to our embitterment; to kill the inner ghost of enticement.
Isn’t the story of darkness every man’s story, and when did the Prophet say ‘we are all bereft of it?’ The staccato rises as courage breaks and every liberty disparaged, but alive in our shorts, we sing the song of ‘indiscernible inadequacies’.
Journeying through the plot of ‘Prophet Song’, a brilliantly motivating book, the darkness illuminates the life of Eilish probing the truth of ‘revulsion’.
She asks the monotony of slumber to pour life in the vessel of humanity!
She asks the incongruous gibberish to stop for a while to make sense of things!
She asks the hidden affections to rise up to the sleeve to fight the acrimony that stoops low to muffle ‘love’ as a putrid burden!
She asks the military regime of Ireland, ‘why freedom is no longer the gratifying desideratum; why has it become the sharpened tool of neglect and effrontery?
To live or not to live will always be a human choice! She again asks if the hell is right here on this Earth and what about heaven? Why has it become a ritualistic need?
Eilish has lost her husband & son to a deleterious act of governance where lives get vanished in a blink of an eye, promulgating rules that defy an ‘independent spirit’ and shatter the ineluctable defiance like a glass in a hailstorm. What is she now left with?
Don’t we all swell in the unleashed tyranny? Unlocking the digestive juices of the past that have no role to play in the present from where the ‘future’ looks like the whirring of the blender. Eilish just feels the same.
‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch is about human sufferings born in the dystopic conscious of resent and rebel. The rendition of apocalypse plays in the mind but hope keeps the alive living. What if ‘hope’ is discretionary? Eilish whispers to Larry every bit she feels knowing that he is not there but hopes for him to come back. Her elder son ‘Mark’ joins the rebel group; she wants to protect him but he shudders; hope to secure him falls like a dry powder on the ground. ‘Hope’ that one day the sonorous gunshots and firing devilry will abate; the imperceptible suffocation will die and the dewlap of incessant fears will stop judging the intolerable.
Pensive and Poignant, ‘Prophet Song’ is about acceptance of what destroys you; passing through the shadows unchaperoned, awkward feet & hands pledging to sustain and the prolapse of tears that no longer deserve a hand-hovering –a song of misbegotten truths that finally become a hedge hammer to awaken us to ‘let go of what eats us’. Thus, the darkness within fights off the devil outside and what comes out is ‘Hope’ aligned to the ‘Truth’ that prospers in its native arpeggio.
It’s a story about accepting emotions, withdrawing from the past, destroying the impending fear and sustaining what is left; a mother’s fight in bereavement to protect her family and take them out of the black hole.
TAKE AWAY
Plots a claustrophobic mania around human depredations!