Prophet by Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché
(Penguin Random House, 2023)
Reviewed by Anne F. Wilson
“I don’t care if it’s elves, I just need to know why and how it’s elves.”
To those who (like me) only knew Helen MacDonald from their beautiful and deeply felt nature writing, Prophet will come as a surprise. Once you know that they write fanfic, it all suddenly makes sense. Prophet is a science fiction thriller that came out of a lockdown project between the two authors, who had not met in person before they started to play with the ideas that led to the book. It was originally intended to be a novella, but one thing led to another, and here we are.
Which is, to start with, on a US airbase in East Anglia, where Sunil Rao has been catapulted from Pentonville prison, to give his opinion on objects that have mysteriously manifested in and around the base. Sunil can tell whether statements are true or not, and thus can identify that these objects have no history. He is however chaotic and unreliable, prone to taking drugs and making passes at the wrong sort of men. He is also scarred from What Went Wrong in Afghanistan, last year (which would be 2009 or thereabouts). However, he is given uptight US Military Intelligence Colonel Adam Rubinstein as minder, who worked with him briefly before Afghanistan. Adam is the only person whose sentences Rao can’t tell are true or false.
It’s more X-files than elves. Prophet turns out to be a mystery substance that causes people to suffer extreme nostalgia, and somehow to generate objects connected with their past. But as Adam and Sunil get closer to the source of the substance, its effects start to change. Can our two heroes stop it before it goes too far?
The book is written with a scalpel-like precision. You don’t notice you’ve been cut until you see the blood, rather like the dialogues between Sunil and Adam. There is a will-they-won’t-they dynamic between them that is maintained throughout. We know that Sunil is gay from the beginning. Adam’s sexuality is a mystery to Sunil, and he needs to keep it that way. The use of tenses is also clever—as a rule present-day scenes are written in the present tense, and flashbacks in the past, except for Adam’s memories of his appalling childhood, which are presumably still present to him.
I enjoyed the book—it’s clever, flashy and implausible, with the glossy hyper-reality of a Hollywood movie. I do have a few reservations, however.
There are Too Many Acronyms. It is, of course, a way of suggesting without tediously describing the US military machine. It got easier after I found the glossary at the back, although non-military acronyms (I think I’ll call them NMAs) are still puzzling—MVP anyone?
The plot IMO lacks plausibility. Some of our heroes’ deductions are rather too pat, coincidences (not very) hidden in plain sight and logic-free leaps turn out to be correct because Sunil Says So. All the plot threads are signposted, though far from obviously. But the novel doesn’t really explore nostalgia, or how and why politicians are already weaponizing it, nor is Prophet a serious threat in our world. Although a contaminated water supply is a very real threat, it is more likely to arise from corporate greed and negligence than Evil Scientists.
It is also so concisely written that I kept finding myself paging back to ask “Wait, why are we here now? Who is this guy we are looking for?” To be honest, I would have been happy with a bit more redundancy.
Overall, though, it’s a romp. The action is fast paced, but nicely balanced against the flashbacks, and the dialogue snappy. The book opens with Sunil, having just been extracted from prison, fencing verbally with a US military official to find out what they want with him. If brittle repartee gets on your nerves, give this book a miss. Fortunately, I quite enjoy it.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.