Prophet Song (2023) by Paul Lynch

 Book Review

Prophet Song (2023)

by Paul Lynch

   Every year there are a few Booker Prize nominees who see their US publication delayed until after the announcement of the longlist, shortlist or winner.  It's a frank admission that a Booker nomination is the best thing a writer of fiction from outside the United States can have to appeal to an American audience.  I would guess its the difference between logging low hundreds of sales vs thousands, based on my experience with independent music.

   My money this year was on The Bee Sting, by another Irish author, but of course, I couldn't read Prophet Song without buying a UK copy, so I couldn't fairly judge.   Prophet Song is a work of political fiction with a lowercase "p" about a near-future Ireland making a slouching decent into EU style bureaucratic fascism.  The narrator is  Eilish Stack, a health care industry analyst married to an Irish trade-union official- a quasi-governmental role in normal times.  Her husband is disappeared in the opening chapters, leaving the mother-of-four to face the encroaching future alone. 

   What Prophet Song mostly reminded me of were the opening sequences of Children of Men, where Clive Owen is struggling with day-to-day life amidst the collapse of a tottering regime.  It's clear to see the appeal of Prophet Song to the Booker panel- this book is both political with a small p- the best kind of political in literary fiction AND a big P in its depiction of a nascent fascist state.  It is both domestic- a single mother of four narrator/protagonist AND highly literary in style- with paragraphs that go one for pages at a time. In other words, it is the perfect Booker winner and another example of how the expansion of eligibility- Irish books were first included in 2018 and Americans and other non-Commonwealth authors published in the UK became eligible in 2014- has impacted the nominees and winners.

   Most of what I enjoyed in Prophet Song were here face-to-face interactions with the people working for this new, fascist government- referred to as "the party" throughout.  It reminded me of my own interactions with government officials within the criminal justice system.  I've often thought that it would be easy enough for many of these people to enforce injustice as so-called justice, and this book seems to be exactly about that observation.  

   

The Church of Dead Girls: A Thriller (1997) by Stephen Dobyns

 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America

The Church of Dead Girls: A Thriller(1997)

by Stephen Dobyns

New York:  1/105

Aurelius, New York

Upstate: 1/23

   Welcome to Chapter 2 of 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, editor Susan Straight's 2023 mapping project of the American Literary landscape- literally! There is an actual map.  This chapter is called Empire States and Atlantic Shores.  108 of the titles are from New York.   Based on my understanding of New York geography, 18 of the New York titles are from upstate and the rest are from New York City and its suburbs.  So that means 90 books for NYC, 18 for the rest of New York and 13 for New Jersey- putting it at the same level as New Hampshire.  I'm assuming this will be the biggest chapter in terms of number of titles- with 12 chapters the average is 83.5 books per chapter, and New England was already over at 91, meaning that after two chapters the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America will be already be 44 titles over.

  When I look at the first 91 titles from New England I see really solid top 20, including several books I'd already read and didn't read again for the project.   Another twenty after that were worth while and then the bottom 50 were like, couldn't wait to be done.   I'd call that about a 50% hit rate.  The first chapter- with its 91 books took me six months so the I would guess this chapter will go to September.

    Starting off weak with upstate New York- which- this is going to be like another New Hampshire/Connecticut type situation I'm guessing- plenty of genre stuff and domestic fiction about people who never left small towns and people who come back.   The Church of Dead Girls: A Thriller is written by mystery-genre author Stephen Dobyns, though this is not from his series of moderately succesful books of detective that are also set in upstate New York. 

     I get that this is supposed to be a portrait of a particular upstate town in New York, but it didn't feel very specific.  Worse was the plot which has a plot that does no favors to the mentally ill or the LGBT community despite featuring an LGBT narrator.  I suffered through the Audiobook- it felt like forever.  When the killer was finally revealed I was left non-plussed.  Not a great start for New York in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.