The perils of nostalgia

For those familiar with Helen MacDonald’s popular nature memoir H is for Hawk (2014), her latest work will come as a surprise. Prophet is many things, most of which bear little resemblance to any of MacDonald’s previous work. To begin with, Prophet is a co-authored work of fiction, a rare feature in the world of novelists, in which co-authors are often compelled to conceal such paratextual detail, as in Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s The Expanse series, published under the pen name James S. A. Corey. Where other narrative arts enjoy the cachet of collaboration, literature – in particular literary fiction – prefers the toil of the sole creator. It is only right, then, that Prophet is a bona-fide page turner made of equal parts spy thriller, science fiction, and romance. Germinated in collaborative back and forth over Zoom at the height of the pandemic, friends MacDonald and Sin Blaché have produced an action novel that, while carrying the troubling traces of the time, leans into the comforting diet of cultural nostalgia millions embraced during the binge-filled days of lockdown.

Prophet begins with the sudden and distinctly X-Files-like appearance of an American diner near a NATO airbase in Suffolk. Lit up and decked out in full postwar American glory, the ersatz diner has no foundations, plumbing, or source of electricity. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the base other curios appear out of nowhere – a Cabbage Patch doll, a Scrabble box, a Pac-Man arcade machine, and so on – around the same time as an airman’s self-immolation and death in a bonfire.