Reviews with content warning for Blood - Prophet Song

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

19 reviews

jacss's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

This was intense. I started reading it a few months ago, but couldn't finish it in time (libraries eh). Picked it up at the book store recently and was able to finish it.

Although it was easy to hop back into the story, intriguing as it is, the writing needed some getting used to again. For some reason my brain wants to skip passages when quotation marks are left out. So that took some discipline.

The story itself is a dystopian war that unfolds slowly in Ireland and follows a normal family. Starting off with "that is impossible, they wouldn't let they happen would they?" and finishing with absolute horrors. I had to put the book down near the end, but picking it back up is worth it.

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jesstaurant's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

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nialiversuch's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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edward_eb's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I was really gripped by this book. Very pertinent to the terrible events happening all over the world today. And at its heart a book about family and love and the things people will do to keep what feels most familiar and safe, sometimes at a deadly cost. At points it was almost too sad and frustrating but absolutely worth the read and well crafted. It lends itself to audiobook very well too.

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l1ndz7's review against another edition

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5.0

This book was incredibly moving, devastating and completely reminiscent of world affairs. As the war was brought closer to Eilish’s family, it reminded me more and more of the occupation in Palestine and that the events that take place in this book have happened and are happening in places around the world right now. This is reality, maybe a far off reality to the West, but real nonetheless.

Normally, a book with huge paragraphs and no quotation marks would have been a DNF immediately (sorry not sorry Sally Rooney) but the writing was so poetic and urgent, I couldn’t stop reading. Yes, this took me months to read but it shook me and I had to put it down and read something else at times because it was so intense.

I listened to an interview of Paul Lynch shortly after writing this and watching that solidified Paul as an auto-buy author. He said that the writing structure was intentional and was meant to keep you in the moment and not just sympathize but empathize with Eilish. He also said that this novel explores the complexity of situations like this and make you realize how hard it is to leave everything you know. Once you read this, you will no longer say when asked questions like, “would you have left immediately when the Holocaust happened?” that you would. It’s never as easy it seems trying to escape something that you’re blind to and have very little knowledge about. Paul intended this novel to “decondition” us and I think he did so brilliantly. In addition, it also explores the problem with denial and how it’s useful to have until it’s not and if you deny long enough it ends up making everything worse.

What a fantastic novel. Well done, Paul Lynch 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

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jayhall's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

...the song of the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, 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 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...

A masterful and meaningful story that encapsulates the feelings of futility and desperation present in the plights of refugees and migrants the world over, but does so in a way that touches very close to home for Western readers, making the news stories feel as though they could be the life story of a neighbour or colleague, at least to this reader.

The only reason this isn't a 5 for me is the writing style. Lynch foregoes the use of paragraph breaks and punctuation, cultivating rambling, stream-of-consciousness sentences as Eilish jumps from thought to thought. While this effectively conveys the panic and claustrophobia of the narrator to the reader, it made this story slower paced than a feel it could have been, as I often had to re-read and go back to understand what was actually said. I would have preferred something similar that moved the reader along quicker, to really hammer home the panic.

While several plot points were left unresolved,

including Larry's fate, Mark's journey, Bailey's final moments, and the family's ultimate ending,

I'm fully in favour of Lynch's decision to leave the questions in our mind, as a family in such a situation would likely also be left yearning for resolution that might never come.

Overall, an incredible and important novel, fully deserving of the accolades that have come in Paul Lynch's direction!

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cibani's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

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rheagoveas's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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steveatwaywords's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Much heat around this novel, a Booker winner nonetheless, and I can understand the perspectives from both sides, most carrying loads of presumption about what a reading experience should be. I prefer, so much as I can, to allow each book to speak to its purpose on its own terms, and then my reviews mark it to how well it was accomplished.

To begin, I too, was off-put by the novel's style, at first: massive single-paragraph blocks with dialogue mashed in, the craftings of image or moment buried in unlooked-for details somewhere inside them. What was Lynch thinking? Shouldn't this be a gripping story of terror as a family falls victim to a growing autocracy and war?

Yes, it is. Claustrophobic, even suffocating, experiences a monumental blur, every event of life piled on top of another demanding our attention with equal fervor, who are we to understand and sort it out? This sense of overwhelm, as so many of us experienced during the politics of the pandemic, is tripled here. In brief, this is as much a reading experience as it is a literary novel of plot and theme.

Little need to detail the events of this woman whose men (father, husband, sons) are swept away by various circumstances to places dark and uncertain. Desperately she accepts her role of holding her family together, and at some point (you decide when but we will all disagree) her noble strength becomes ignorant folly. As the country and family slip apart, as the four children each suffer their trauma in unique ways, as tightly as the narrative camera focuses in on her, we see how easily--how anonymously--she might become a statistic of war, her story lost, disappeared.

And this growing tension is absolutely relentless. We might argue how many choices were actually available, about what sacrifices would "reasonably" be made when all is unreasonable. We might even argue responsibility for the suffering. But we will agree: the events are entirely too plausible, too hyperreal, too close to our fears and too (f)actual for communities who do suffer (and against whom we build walls).

Build what you want. Lynch takes these walls apart, and some of us will still not believe.

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adamtjeerdsma's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I loved this book. The writing style through me off at first but it really worked to help get into Eilish's head. Everything was essentially a stream of consciousness but it was still easy to decipher what was going on the whole time.

(Light spoilers below)

This story did a great job of getting inside someone's head when they live in an increasingly authoritarian government

and later a peaceful town transitioning into a warzone.

You understand Eilish's rationale for every decision she makes even when you, as an outsider looking in, don't agree, you still understand.

Pulling from one of the last pages (pg. 302 in my edition), I think Mona really sums up the thoughts and feelings of Eilish (and yes, this is all one sentence):

"We were offered visas, you know, to Australia, and return them down, my husband said no, plan and simple, he said it was impossible to go at the time and I suppose he was right, and how could he have known anyhow, how could any of us have known what was going to happen, I suppose other people seem to know, but I never understood how they were so certain, what I mean is, you can never have imagined it, not in a million years, all that was to happen, and I could never understand those that left, how they could just leave like that, leave everything behind, all that life, all that living, it was absolutely impossible for us to do so at the time and the more I look at it the more it seems there was nothing we can do anyhow, what I mean is there was never any real room for action, that time with the visas, how were we supposed to go when we had so many commitments, so many responsibilities, everything has got worse there was just no room for maneuver, I think what I'm trying to say is that I used to believe in free will, if you had asked me before all this I would have told you I was as free as a bird, but now I'm not so sure, now, I don't see how free will is possible when you are cut up within such a monstrosity, one thing leads to another thing until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do, I can see now that what I thought of as freedom was really just struggle and that there was no freedom all along, but look, she says, taking Ben by the hand and dancing him, we are here now aren't we in so many other people are gone, we're the lucky ones seeking a better life, there is only looking forward now, isn't that right, perhaps there's a little freedom to be found and that thought because at least you can make the future your own in your thoughts and if we keep looking back we will die in a way and there is still some living to be done..."

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