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A review by tbartlett
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
5.0
Found myself interested in this book when it won the Booker Prize and even more interested when I saw that it was about fascism. And now that I've finished it, I will be thinking about it for some time.
Lynch makes you ask yourself some terrifying but necessary questions: Would you stay or leave your home country when you find yourself facing a terrible authoritarian government? When would you leave? What would it take for you to leave? Why? And the leaving isn't always the end of one's worries because terror can follow you across borders.
Following is the excerpt that I will come back to and think about the most:
Lynch makes you ask yourself some terrifying but necessary questions: Would you stay or leave your home country when you find yourself facing a terrible authoritarian government? When would you leave? What would it take for you to leave? Why? And the leaving isn't always the end of one's worries because terror can follow you across borders.
Following is the excerpt that I will come back to and think about the most:
" . . . and she sees her children delivered into a world of devotion and love and sees them damned to a world of terror, wishing for such a world to end, wishing for the world its destruction, and she looks at her infant son, this child who remains an innocent and she sees how she has fallen afoul of herself and grows aghast, seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again, and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by 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, . . . "