A Pure Clear Light
Text Classics
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3.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Simon and Flora Beaufort have three perfect children and a comfortable, happy life in London. When Flora takes the children for a month-long vacation in France, Simon stays home to work on his latest film project...what could go wrong?
A Pure Clear Light examines a marriage at the moment it goes haplessly off-track: Simon succumbs to the temptation of his cool, blonde accountant and Flora heeds the cry of her reawakened faith. Ultimately, though, neither Simon nor Flora can escape the revelation that lies beyond excuses and remorse and candour, at the heart of the phenomenon called love. In St John's hands, what is commonplace is transformed and transcendent.
Madeleine St John was born in Sydney in 1941. Her father, Edward, was a barrister and Liberal politician. Her mother, Sylvette, committed suicide in 1954, when Madeleine was twelve. Her death, she later said, ‘obviously changed everything’.
St John studied Arts at Sydney University, where her contemporaries included Bruce Beresford, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes. In 1965 she married Chris Tillam, a fellow student, and they moved to the United States where they first attended Stanford and later Cambridge.
From Cambridge, St John relocated to London in 1968 with the hope that Chris would follow. The couple did not reunite and the marriage ended. St John settled in Notting Hill. She worked at a series of odd jobs, and then, in 1993, published her first novel, The Women in Black, the only book she set in Australia. When her third novel, The Essence of the Thing (1997), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she became the first Australian woman to receive this honour.
St John died in 2006. She had been so incensed after seeing errors in a French edition of one of her novels that she stipulated in her will that there were to be no more translations of her work.
‘A Pure Clear Light is funny, cruel and finely written, exploring the place and time where marriages and affairs come undone…pitch perfect.’ Sunday Times
‘St John is one of those astonishing masters of dialogue such as Harold Pinter or Helen Garner, though faster than either, so that the effort of her speech is like great tennis or ballet…It’s a book about the search for truth and St John has an all but flawless ear for it.’ Australian
‘Witty, clear-eyed and provocatively perceptive, Madeleine St John deserves a lasting readership.’ Canberra Times
‘Both funny and affecting…her gift for capturing conversation takes us deep into the hearts of both characters.’ West Australian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I haven't got any imagination, as you perfectly well know," says coolly blonde, 30ish accountant Gillian Selkirk to her married lover, Simon Beaufort. She may be the only one who doesn't in this deceptively calm and studiously ironic study of love sacred and profane. After Simon's wife, Flora, lapsed Catholic and mother of three, leaves their pleasant London home and takes the kids on holiday in France, TV director Simon, to his great surprise, falls in love with Gillian. The siren's song of "pure unadulterated sex" proves irresistible to agnostic Simon, though he is determined not to upset the applecart with Flora. Meanwhile, he sets about casting his next film, looking for an actress as brilliant as the "plain" English ones he knows, but with a more voluptuous body--a French or Italian, he thinks. As Simon is snared by the temptations of film and flesh, Flora, returned from France but still feeling his absence, is drawn to the local Anglican church. By the time Flora's friend Lydia catches Simon and Gillian together at a Bayswater brasserie, the end of their secret affair is almost an anticlimax. What prevails is Flora's austere yet human yearning for God's love, and her determination that the marital relationship must go on in a life she now considers "transitory." Exploring the tension between worldly and religious love as did Graham Greene in The Power and the Glory and Andr Gide in Strait Is the Gate, Booker Prize-nominee St. John does produce "a pure clear light" that springs from Flora's spiritual crisis. Her prose is swift and beautifully spare; the dialogue is sharp and witty; yet the tone of the narrative is chilly, like white winter light, more of a hedge against emotional suicide than a life-affirming renewal of love. In a curious way, Flora's need to shape her religious imagination to escape Simon's worldly imagination comes full circle to resemble sexy and candid Gillian, who has no imagination at all.
