In general, I would say I’m drawn to novels that are tightly focused on a single character; when a story is described as “sprawling” I feel like it’s probably not going to be the book for me. I also don’t read a lot of historical fiction (and when I do, it’s more likely to be a mystery than something “serious”, and more likely to be set in England than America). So The Prophets, which is historical fiction set on a plantation in Mississippi, whose chapters switch from character to character over the course of nearly 400 pages, probably wouldn’t be my first choice if I were browsing the shelves at a bookstore or library. But I got it as a gift, as part of the Strand bookshop’s three-month book subscription package, and decided to read it sooner rather than later because I’m trying to be better about reading books I own.
The Prophets is about Samuel and Isaiah, two enslaved young men, and their relationship—how their love and connection, which is so clearly a thing of joy and beauty and truth, is leered at and judged by others, with consequences for everyone involved. It’s also about so many others on the cotton plantation where the story is set—mostly about other enslaved Black men and women, and the everyday horrors they face, and the choices they make as a result, but also about the plantation’s overseer and its owner, and the owner’s wife and son. The past is part of the story, too: what the various characters remember, or have forgotten, or are trying to forget, and also ancestral pasts, ancestral memories, an imagined African place that shows a set of different possibilities for ideas about gender and relationships. I found myself enjoying the switching perspectives, the way we get so many pieces of so many character’s stories.
As for the style: I like how Jones writes dialogue, and there are some lyrical sentences and images that are really great, like when one character thinks about what she’s heard about enslaved people rising up in the Caribbean: “The same blades they had chopped the cane with were held high, in unison and in charge” (115). Or when another character thinks about watching a dinner party in the Big House and describes it like this: “Essie never saw so many candles lit at once, she said, the soft light coming from so many points, casting the most joyful shadows on every wall, growing and growing until, oddly, they became menacing. At which point, what flooded her mind, and Maggie’s too, she reckoned, was that all it would take was a delicate tap to tip one of the candles over, and maybe the resulting blaze would, likewise, begin as splendor before it became tragedy” (59). Sometimes, though, the style comes off as overwritten rather than lyrical, like when an outhouse is described like this: “It was thin and shocking set against the backdrop of the wilderness. He had it built there, far enough away form the house that the odor didn’t overwhelm. Not too far from the flowers so that they, too, could be the arbitration between what stank and what bloomed” (251). Still: I was engaged enough by the characters that I didn’t mind some clunkiness, and while there were moments when the book felt slow, the last sixty pages went by in a rush.
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