Synopsis:

"All that time, life kept putting its face around the door, but never came into the room."

When Angel learnt her days were numbered, she found it impossible to confide in her husband, Jude. Immersed in the precarious expansion of his business, he little suspected the true cause of her changing health and outlook. And events seemed only too ready to conspire in her silence.

Her dilemma swiftly launched them both on a course bound for disaster. It was to weave a web of misunderstanding which prompted Jude's infidelity and Angel's poignant involvement with "the bookseller of Glenfinnie", reaching a crisis where Jude's own life was imperilled.

While she fought shy of the truth, Angel did not dream that Life was to take on a magnified dimension and place everyday ritual in an ongoing context.

But before that could happen, she was to make an interior journey of discovery, seeing in her condition some analogy with the global unrest of our times and why, perhaps, in western culture, the subject of death is notoriously taboo.

Were Life and Death two sides of the same coin?

Book Excerpt:

We travelled roads cleaving thick forests, fringed with rose bay willow herb echoing the shape of the conifers, where animals could flee from the hunter and the encroachments of civilisation. The only homesteads we came across were roofed with turf and barely distinguishable from the land itself, contained in an isolation so close to the beaten track. In the background, glaciers coruscated in the sun: near at hand, copper-green waterfalls crashed down from great heights, flinging out tiers of spray tinged with rainbows. Jude told me one was called The Bridal Veil. It was said that a French honeymoon couple had approached the bend above it too fast and had gone careering over the precipice.

A shadow fell over the sunny morning; a dark premonition of what I could not have explained. The hollow roar of the water conjured up the mournful but consonant baying of wolves. Poor couple, so recklessly happy as they plunged headlong to their doom. "It won't happen to us, will it?"

Jude laughed at my childlike terror and said he could think of worse ways to go. It must be awful to lose the use of one's faculties, one's awareness of life, as his father, a ponderous man, had done at the end. No, thank you, he said. "Anyway, it's too lovely a day to be moribund."

But I had glimpsed another side of the coin. Hadn't we seen how suddenly the climate could change across the summit's scythe edge? How the graphic landscape could pass into mist and grotesque distortion so that even the clouds lost their shape and form and there was only a negative print of the world?

It was a land of impossible concepts, Norway. A land of illusions, of boats suspended on liquid air. I came to think of our sojourn there as a blueprint for our life together.

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Author Comment:

A Blakesian vision of global unrest. Were Life and Death two sides of the same coin?

Topics/Categories:

Meaning of Life, nature of reality, opposing values in a Britain primed for the Thatcher era, terminal illness, unlikely springs of happiness

Genre:

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Type of Work:

Novel

Publishers:

New Eve Publishing (Lulu)

Purchase From:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Powell's Books

Original Publish Date:

March 7, 2008

Publishing Notes:

This is a brand new and slightly abridged edition. The original version was published in 1980 by Robert Hale Limited, London.

Formats:

Quality Paperback

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