Available to purchase – on Amazon.com – on Amazon.co.uk
This is my novel – which took ages to write. I bloomin’ love it – and that’s a few years on from when I said: OK, that’s it. I hope it makes my reader have a chuckle too. It does me every time I open a page at random.
The blurb goes:
Tomàs is in pain. His thoughts bristle. Mid-life, there has been such a lot of life, and arguably too much fun, so much fun. Poor life-choices have been made.
So now he is here: in Spain, in seminary. (He only wants to be pure. There *is* faith – but it isn’t working.)
Tomàs’s thoughts bristle sexually. The confessional was supposed to fix all this. History suggests that there has been a betrayal – and human reason cannot stand the affront. So the teachings and the doctrines of the Church unravel. Priesthood. Of all things. Priesthood. Because he hasn’t any money…
We live our lives forwards and barely we might understand what happened looking back.
Truth will out. His CV lies – to get here – have not yet beyond repair broken Tomàs. Life will be acknowledged.
Within the march of time as Tomàs fails to thrive, the killing thought is this: that love is truth and truth is love – and that the Church is wrong.
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A study in Christian faith, in truth and mental pilgrimage, in time and love and sexuality.
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‘Tomàs is mostly okay. I have a lot of affection for him. While not an entirely reliable narrator, he is trying to tell the truth, and he basically knows where he’s stretching things. There are one or two matters of sacred text and Church doctrine he’s a bit iffy on. There are passages where the drama of the discourse plays upon internal contradictions in doctrine, in addition to the odd, quaintly spirited hack at Enlightenment standards: contemporary science and the liberal arts peddling their news as it were in the porch at the Vatican. Tomàs is not quite to be entirely trusted here.
Tomàs has reached a point at which he hates every minute of his time in seminary. He is in a hole – symptomatic of clinical depression or aching semi-permanent hangover. All the mind-numbing terrors of the earth are rattling around in a locked-in head. The priests are rubbish, his fellow students as appalling as he is. The faith is missing. One of his problems is that he is very busy failing to believe that this faith as figured in the narratives of the Church is true. There is no sense of a future available to him. The ‘out’ is memory. There is comfort and coherency in memory – up to a point, until that too rebels on him. Tomàs has attempted a kind of perfection – the failure in which is become catastrophically destructive.’