Palace of Tears (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Eamonn Vincent | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

It is 1974 and coming on for Christmas. In an apartment in one of the recently built towers in the Barbican in the City of London, Peter Newman and Ginny Stern, both previously averse to the idea of children, face a startling challenge when Ginny discovers she is pregnant. There is some doubt as to the identity of the baby's father. Even so, Peter and Ginny decide to proceed with the pregnancy, motivated by the prospect of securing Ginny's father's fortune, which Peter intends to use to fuel the expansion of Inflexion Books.

Meanwhile Grace Mitchell, a rising academic star at Cambridge University and Peter's former partner, ignorant of these developments in Ginny and Peter's new relationship and bitter about the way that Peter had thwarted her own maternal aspirations wakes one morning after the end of the Michaelmas term and decides to get herself pregnant. The only problem is: by whom?

Enter, somewhat improbably, Steve Percival, the hapless protagonist of Event/Horizon. In the closing pages of that novel, Steve had come to the eccentric conclusion that the cause of the disastrous series of misfortunes that had been visited upon him, including, most painfully, the break-up with Ginny, was the long poem he had been working on. Since then, things have got no less complicated for Steve.

At the beginning of Palace of Tears, he is living in a shabby rooming house near the station, from which he is rescued by Grace, keen to avail herself of the fecundity of a younger man in pursuit of her hopes of becoming pregnant. However, another resident of the rooming house, Jude, the feisty redhead who lives upstairs, considers that she has a prior claim in matters of intimacy. It turns out that the hold Jude has over Steve is not confined to the delights of her shapely body and flaming tresses.

Matters are further complicated by Mavis, Steve's mother, informing him that she is moving to West Berlin with her job. Steve finds this surprising, a not uncommon occurrence in Steve's life, since he had thought her job at the Foreign Office a rather lowly one. But soon he too has reasons to travel to Berlin and finds himself caught up in matters of espionage, the hallmark pursuit of the Cold War. In the ensuing complexities, it seems that his mother is the not the only one who has been less than open about her past.

Back in Cambridge and trying to make sense of the events in which he had been caught up, Steve sits down to write a play dealing with issues of loyalty and betrayal, of living a lie, of sacrificing one's hopes of happiness for the greater good, however distorted those hopes look in the Cold War hall of mirrors. Gary Lewis, a leading director, jumps at the chance to stage the play and helps Steve develop it for its premiere at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge. Steve throws himself into all aspects of the play's production and the first night is a triumph. But the murky milieu into which he had fallen reasserts itself and the prospects for his play and his own happiness soon wither.

There are consolations, there are always consolations in Steve's life, often in the shape of a pretty girl, but the novel ends with Steve once again in an equivocal situation. As to the competing procreative ambitions of Ginny and Grace, only a close reading of Palace of Tears will suffice.