To those readers who know Helen Macdonald from their exact and wonderful writing about the natural world, including the bestselling memoir of grief H Is for Hawk, this book, a trippy, philosophical science-fiction novel with the pacing of a thriller and the pulse of a romance, is an unusual departure. Macdonald – who, like their co-author and friend Sin Blaché, uses the pronoun they – has described in recent interviews how the book was born of the frustrations of lockdown, when the pair of them filled some of the downtime with internet chats about a shared interest in science-fiction and the TV and video games of their childhood. Those conversations not only prompted the writing of this novel but also its plotline.
Prophet begins deep in the Suffolk countryside, where, near a Nato airbase, an American diner, complete with jukebox and chrome fittings, has appeared overnight fully formed in a field. It glows neon in the twilight but there is no source for its power, no plumbing for its water. On the base itself other objects have been appearing, without obvious histories: a bunch of roses, a cabbage patch doll, a Scrabble box, a kid’s bike, a Pac-Man arcade game. These appearances have coincided with the death of an airman at the base, incinerated in a bonfire of his own making.
To connect these events, military intelligence has reunited an unlikely pair of detectives. Sunil Rao is a dissolute former Sotheby’s art specialist and MI6 agent who retains an uncanny ability to tell a lie from the truth and a fake from the real thing. Rao has been released from Pentonville prison for the assignment and he doesn’t have to sit for long in the uncanny diner to know for sure it is “wrong”. The Cagney to his Lacey is Lieutenant Colonel Adam Rubenstein, a US special forces soldier. The pair of them, we learn in a series of backstory chapters, had operated together in Tashkent before Rao was sent to Afghanistan to act as an unwilling human lie detector in interrogations. Rubenstein is, to begin with, as self-contained as Rao is chaotic. Their banter, full of cultural reference – some of it you imagine lifted from the authors’ own lockdown interactions – drives the investigation.
The atmosphere of the pandemic, with unknown strains of virus and distant lab leaks, has also seeped into the engine of this book, which toys with conspiracy and paranoia. The connection between the events at the airbase appears to be the accidental escape of a substance, known by the codename Prophet, that is part of a secret weapons programme. The substance is a curious kind of nerve agent: it conjures fatal doses of sentimentality in anyone it contacts. It is a sort of Novichok of nostalgia. The cabbage patch doll, the diner and the bike are all manifestations of different individuals’ treasured childhood memories, and once Prophet has caused those objects to materialise they exert a fatal hold over their inadvertent creators, leaving them in trance-like states, unable to comprehend the present.
Rao and Rubenstein are, happily, immune to this weapon, with its druggy powers of time travel. Their effort to track and trace its origins leads them to a research facility in the Colorado Desert, where things, as Rao suggests, get altogether “more Twilight Zone”. That same journey leads authors Macdonald and Blaché into a freewheeling kind of meditation on the seductive comfort blanket of memory, and the perils of living in the past as an escape from a threatening present and an anxiety-freighted future. In some senses their book, both in style and substance, is an enjoyable homage to all the TV and film they clearly loved as teenagers – everything from The X-Files to the Bourne movies – but it also wants to find a convincing path out of that reanimated past.
The hope for that future is pinned on the pair of operatives whose partnership develops into a love story – one that draws into question the nature of authenticity. Both of them just about come alive on the page, despite the clunky range of character references they embody. By the end, the novel betrays its origins as a kind of welcome distraction for its authors, but there is more than enough going on for it to tick that box for plenty of readers too.
Prophet by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
