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Whether sad, fierce or downright murderous, these clairvoyant figures have enthralled writers from Sophocles to Charlotte Brontë and Hilary MantelAt the end of his prophetic journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, Dante has a vision of a book. Standing in the presence of God, he sees “bound up with love together in one volume, what through the universe in leaves is scattered”. Here is a basic taxonomy then: God is a novelist. Human beings are His characters. Prophets are the readers.More often than not, the way that it works is that human beings come to despise prophets, just as you might come to despise someone who has read the story of your life and keeps trying to tell you about it while you’re in the middle of trying to live it.Thus it is hard to be a prophet. Prophets are havers of visions and bad dreams; they are difficult to be around.Like gods, writers sometimes introduce prophets into their invented universes. When they do, the prophet takes up a special position between reader and character. They are messengers from beyond the back of the book. Because they are so like us – the readers of the books – and so unlike us at the same time, prophets are uncanny and scary. My book, The End of Nightwork, is about that most pointless and painful of things: the passage of time. In the book, the protagonist – Pol – is haunted by the influence of a 17th-century millenarian, called Bartholomew Playfere. Like all prophets, Playfere refuses to be part of his own time. Instead he becomes part of a future, a future that Pol coincidentally participates in. Continue reading...