PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)It is no spoiler to reveal that the novel ends with a twinkling vision of generous acceptance by the open-hearted local community. But it would be redundant to indict this ending, and the novel itself, for its sentimental whimsy, since this is the furrow Williams has chosen to plough. Whether it’s your thing will be a question of personal taste, but from the practitioner’s perspective it is fascinating to see such hoary old hokum spun from the pen of a real virtuoso. Though he has little interest in conventional plot, Williams has a remarkable facility for inventive narrative digression.
Paul Lynch
RaveTimes Literary Supplement\"...thunderously powerful ... The stage seems set for a fine political thriller, with one brave woman forced to find the strength to fight back, secure her husband’s release and uncover the dark secret at the heart of the new regime. But Lynch is playing a very different game. As he chips away at the certainties of Eilish’s life, so he strips away the comforting conventions of narrative suspense; as he frustrates her need for clarity and closure, so too he rejects our desire for exposition and dramatic balance ... Lynch reins in his remarkable descriptive skill and instead lets procedural and circumstantial detail suggest familiar real-world horrors. Syria and Ukraine are obvious reference points, but, given the modern Irish context, the most potent echoes are of the civil conflict north of the border half a century ago, and for readers who lived through it, the house searches and roadblocks, the persecution of dissent, and the idealistic resort to armed resistance will feel more like a warning from recent history than a bravura display of dystopian imagination ... In Prophet Song Paul Lynch asks us to face some of our darkest fears, and if he offers no comfort, and little hope, then we must surely recognize his true purpose: that the furious reader should return to the real world determined to find a better ending for this story.\
Mark O'Connell
RaveTimes Literary Supplement\"...we get O’Connell’s relentlessly self-conscious reflections on his tangled motivations for taking up the project, constantly anticipating, if not always answering, every ethical objection a reader might raise. In a sense this is a book that critiques itself as it proceeds, and, to its author’s great credit, it doesn’t always like what it finds ... there are moments when the delicate ethical arithmetic falters and the suspicion arises that O’Connell is trying to have it both ways, especially around his responsibility to the victims and their families. Faced with the burden of describing the first murder, he insists that it can’t be done, when he has just spent the previous paragraph doing exactly that, in vivid snapshots...He agonizes over the best strategy to avoid his book causing further anguish to the bereaved, but never lets himself consider the obvious solution: that he not write it at all. These are, however, brief lapses in an engrossing study, thick with moral ambiguity and startling detail, a rare volume that should appeal equally to the exacting creative nonfiction maven and the insatiable true-crime addict.\
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
