Paul Lynch | Prophet Song | Feb 16, 2024

"I think the dark matter that surrounds us is profoundly interesting, largely because we are so optimistically wired that we don't see it. We move through our lives in certainty. We're convinced that we're making the right choices all the time, but we're completely blind." -Paul Lynch
Paul Lynch appeared at Toronto Reference Library's Appel Salon to discuss Prophet Song, his 2023 Booker Prize-winning novel offering a terrifying vision of an Ireland careening towards authoritarianism, with Claire Cameron on February 16, 2024.

[@thomasalbert6687]

Talented writer. He is marvelous at describing a scene or setting---you can just about smell it. Also the way he glides thru dialogue without quotation marks & the he said/she said. There's a bit of a cool remove which helps and hurts the work. The detachment helps the reader see the panorama of dystopia, but because it feels and seems to happen like a mirage in front of you, the narrative does not sweep you away. There gets to be a feeling of uninvolved sameness. At one point I checked the length of the novel and was relieved the work of reading it would end at @ 300 pages. But what a scene-setter and sentence-smith.

[@thembamabona9809]

Loved the novel, despite its display of overly much cruelty. But I didn't understand why in the final paragraphs he so shamelessly fished for contemporary relevance (the sea....). And: the setting in Ireland with its super-clear historical antagonism is a strange placement which I couldn't grasp, especially after having read The Milkman. ....it's a bit of an ambivalent reading pleasure.