Book description
Purple is the colour of violence, passion, penance and panache; the
symbolic shade of kings and emperors, of cardinals and popes. It is also
the punch-drunk colour of Wendy Perriam’s extraordinary new novel which
combines outrageous sex with radiant religion, redeems sin with
resurrection and capsizes comedy with shock.
Thea Morton, the crazed yet childlike heroine, seeks her absent father
in every man she meets. Having rejected the kindly, bookish Adrian with
his stifling economies and pedantic word-power, she taunts and worships
Leo - darkly violent and disturbingly erotic - who lands her in hospital
with broken teeth and bloody mouth. Disillusioned with mortal men, she
turns to priest and God, seeking to seduce the one and consume the
other.
In her quest for God and father, Thea travels to the Marian town of
Lourdes, that hopeless, hoping shrine of the Catholic church, where, in
seeking a miracle she is granted instead a mission so shocking and
stupendous, it changes the whole tenor of her life. St Bernadette
herself becomes a character in a novel which adds the supernatural to an
already powerful range of themes.
Thea crumbles, along with the Marian shrine. Returning from Lourdes
already shocked and chastened, she finds her world at home
disintegrating, and her last spiritual refuge becomes a violent sexual
nightmare.
After Purple
is a tale of sex, violence and religion, with a strong dose of comedy
to wash it down. But the deeper levels and underlying symbolism give
Wendy Perriam’s always fertile imagination a new force and power.
‘An extravagant big dipper of a book . . . displaying a boldness, and
exuberance and sharpness of eye . . . not for the weak of stomach.’
The Times
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her
first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and
told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs,
ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her
time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she
went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed
for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written
extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor
to radio programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
