Abandoned!

Sometimes a book is just not for you. I had heard a lot of praise for Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, and it won the Booker Prize in 2023; it was not too fat, and I was intrigued by the premise of the story, which charts the gradual disintegration of a Western democracy and the irresistible creep of tyranny. And I am, I was, interested in the story -- the progress of the narrative kept me reading for the first sixty pages, as Eilish's husband is arrested and the family's passport renewal is denied.

But then I stopped.

I was defeated by Lynch's writing style. Long run-on paragraphs stretching across several pages, almost no punctuation, no speech marks, even when there's more than one speaker. Maybe the fault is mine -- I read fast, I like to immerse myself in the text so it feels like swimming effortlessly through the story. With Prophet Song, I kept stumbling over the prose, I had to stop and go back and pick up the thread again. Maybe that was the author's intention? Perhaps the reader is supposed to slow down and reflect, rather than skimming across the surface of the story?

But in the end, I felt so frustrated by the reading experience that I decided not to persist. Lynch has won the Booker, I don't think my decision will cost him any readers, and there are so many more books I would rather be reading. I gave up.