On Paul Trathen's recommendation I have just read Mr Golightly's Holiday by Salley Vickers. In this novel Vickers manages to write convincingly about goodness and happy endings; a very difficult feat to achieve.
Discussion of the comic and tragic is at the heart of the issues explored within the novel with the comic - understood as "a particular slant of vision, one which sees the potential, deep in the core of human affairs, for misfortune's alternative" - predominating. This perspective, which Vickers owes to Northtrop Frye, has synergies with JRR Tolkien's writings on 'eucatastrophes' which characterise fairy tales, myths and the true myth of the Incarnation. Also, in that Vickers believes that the adoption of a comic view of life may in fact encourage the possibility of misfortune's alternative, her ideas resonate with those of Nicholas Mosley when he writes about "a way of thinking which will take account of both the hope and hopelessness, responsibility and helplessness, the good not in spite of but together with the evil” and argues that by speaking, writing and living in this style seeming opposites might be held from a higher point of view and “errors accepted as the purveyors of learning rather than traps.”
Mr Golighty's Holiday was conceived through the device of humanising God (a device that also features in Mr Weston's Good Wine by TF Powys) and culminates in a replaying of Christ's passion (a device also found in Nikos Kazantzakis' Christ Recrucified). Throughout the story is sustained by means of a divine dialogue; a theological theme on which I plan to be blogging in 2008. In this novel the template for this dialogue is the book of Job which Vickers admires because "with all the potential there for a tragedy, by virtue of his unyielding spirit Job refuses to allow his life to become one." In the light of my own recent bereavement, this reflection and this novel speak powerfully.
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Lou Reed & Victoria Williams - Tarbelly & Featherfoot.
2 comments:
I am glad you got to read this before the year is out.
I attended a very lacklustre discussion of the book at the last meeting of the book group of which I am a member. (Most had not persisted in reading it - they quashed the enthusiasm of the few who had and who might, with very differing understandings of (and languages for) theology, have wished to tilt at some of these windmills.)
In order to find an alternative to this misfortune, I am pleased to think that we can discuss this further at some point. I intend to reread the book soon and will likely post bits (and comments) to my blog, likewise.
I'm up for discussing it further. I'll look out for what you post on your blog.
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