Book description
Daniel has reached the dangerous age of forty and has just embarked on
his first affair - a source of mingled guilt and ecstasy. His wife,
Penny, seems unaware, but, worryingly, his thirteen-year-old
stepdaughter has stopped speaking.
He first met Penny and Pippa in Paris - two flame-haired innocents
abroad, as seemingly happy-go-lucky as he was conventional and shy. Now,
nine years on, Pippa is mute, Penny frustrated, and Daniel himself torn
between his mistress and his family.
The pressures slowly build, until at last he agrees to visit a Welsh
healer who has set up camp on the site of a derelict lead-mine in one of
the remotest parts of Wales. As a child of only seven, Daniel had been
sent away to boarding school in Wales and, after the horror of his
‘prison-years’, has vowed never to return there. The grim memories blast
back, however, once he sets foot in the camp and, though the healer may
be a charlatan and his fellow campers range from the bizarre to the
plain batty, he is forced to realize that it is he who is in need of
healing as much as Pippa.
In a dramatic climax in which father, daughter and healer are finally
reconciled, Daniel exchanges his narrow view of life for one more open
to mystery and the numinous, and at last understands the healer’s words
about grace ‘breaking and entering’ his soul.
In this, her eleventh novel, Perriam examines disability in its many
different guises, and the true meaning of healing; combining such
challenging themes with the wit, exuberance and sexual daring which have
made her name. 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.’
