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A review by hostile
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
2.0
i am not the target (and i say target because i believe this is a work attempting to force a specific audience into feeling empathy for refugees) of this book. i don't mind that.
for me this is less of a feared future and more of a known past and understood reality. it already happened for my family. it is currently happening for many families, but we'll get to that.
what i do mind is that the proverbial shoes have been borrowed with no consideration given to the intellectual work that people who have lived through imperialist war, fascism, totalitarian regimes have done. i see nothing of the novels and the theoretical writings about these forces (of course in prophet song these forces remain vague lest the target is scared away!).
so, there is no interest in how this comes to happen. it's a suburban fantasy, fine, but when you use the image of refugees fleeing out to sea as the final punchy image of your book without demonstrating an understanding of the mechanisms that drive people out to sea, i'm going to be suspicious.
why use refugees as a rhetorical tool? is this humanization, because it feels othering. are the imagined white suburban racists going to read this book, or is it written for well meaning liberals who already pity refugees who will read it and extract some catharsis from a narrow understanding of losing your home and who will feel good about themselves for having done it because /they/ are not racist, /they/ have put themselves in the shoes of the other and felt horror, maybe shed some tears.
specific gripe: eilish does not understand what is happening to her, other than when she knows exactly what is happening to her (as in the mechanisms of intergenerational trauma, which was coined to talk about holocaust survivors for gods sake).
2 stars because i actually did not hate the prose and it was very readable. but conceptualization is way more important to me.
a good summary would be "wouldnt it be fucked up if it happened to us? damn, it must be hard being a refugee"
anyway, it was a condescending objective at the outset.
for me this is less of a feared future and more of a known past and understood reality. it already happened for my family. it is currently happening for many families, but we'll get to that.
what i do mind is that the proverbial shoes have been borrowed with no consideration given to the intellectual work that people who have lived through imperialist war, fascism, totalitarian regimes have done. i see nothing of the novels and the theoretical writings about these forces (of course in prophet song these forces remain vague lest the target is scared away!).
so, there is no interest in how this comes to happen. it's a suburban fantasy, fine, but when you use the image of refugees fleeing out to sea as the final punchy image of your book without demonstrating an understanding of the mechanisms that drive people out to sea, i'm going to be suspicious.
why use refugees as a rhetorical tool? is this humanization, because it feels othering. are the imagined white suburban racists going to read this book, or is it written for well meaning liberals who already pity refugees who will read it and extract some catharsis from a narrow understanding of losing your home and who will feel good about themselves for having done it because /they/ are not racist, /they/ have put themselves in the shoes of the other and felt horror, maybe shed some tears.
specific gripe: eilish does not understand what is happening to her, other than when she knows exactly what is happening to her (as in the mechanisms of intergenerational trauma, which was coined to talk about holocaust survivors for gods sake).
2 stars because i actually did not hate the prose and it was very readable. but conceptualization is way more important to me.
a good summary would be "wouldnt it be fucked up if it happened to us? damn, it must be hard being a refugee"
anyway, it was a condescending objective at the outset.