Book description
Abandoned by God and her husband, twin totems of her life to date,
Morna Gordon embarks on a voyage of discovery, travelling first to
California where she undergoes a series of extraordinary experiences,
ending up in Disneyland, ‘the happiest place on earth’ - though not for
her.
Shaken, she flees to a near-deserted island in the Hebrides where
David, historian and researcher, is working on the Life of a
seventh-century saint. Morna, translator by profession, has to learn,
through David and his saint, a new interpretation of the world. Her
contribution to his work helps forge a powerful bond between them, and
slowly, movingly, and despite the still smarting slap-down of the
Catholic Church, they discover body as well as soul.
The novel also explores the lives of Morna’s mother and daughter,
charting Bea’s private crisis of faith and Chris’s stormy journey to
maturity. Complex ties and tensions bind these three generations of
women, all of whom suffer a ‘sea-change’.
The Stillness The Dancing
juxtaposes youth with age, the rational with the numinous, subatomic
physics with ancient pagan ritual, the grab-all twentieth century with
the hair-shirt idealism of the Age of the Saints. It is a novel full of
contrasts - switching boldly from humour to tragedy and broaching vital
themes of faith and doubt, sham and self-delusion, while losing nothing
of the uninhibited exuberance for which Wendy Perriam is known.
‘Unashamedly sexual, yet profoundly spiritual . . . a remarkable novel.
It must be read.’ Fay Weldon
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.’
