My Father's Moon
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
With an introduction by J.M. Coetzee
'The novel at the heart of all her work' Helen Daniel, The Age
Vera is young, awkward and naive. As a schoolgirl, she has her sheltered idealism, her Quaker boarding-school education, and the warm, enveloping sense of security of her parents. As a student nurse during the war, her transition into womanhood is rapid, painful and disastrous. And as an unmarried mother she flees from the nagging tension of her home and the hospital gossip to Fairfields, a place of poetry, music and of people with interesting lives and ideas. Quickly she learns it is otherwise. Yet, for Vera, there is always the moon - her companion, comforter, and the unbreakable link with her father...
Full of alarming perceptions, black irony and tenderness, My Father's Moon is the first book in Jolley's semi-autobiographical trilogy that also includes Cabin Fever and The George's Wife.
Winner of The Age's Book of the Year Award
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Darker in tone than her recent The Sugar Mother , Jolley's new novel establishes a somber, brooding atmos phere in the first of 10 interlocking segments, then flashes back to the circumstances that led to Vera Wright's current plight and bleak future. Brought up in a lower-class neighborhood in an English mining town by parents who scrimp to send her to boarding school and nursing college, Vera is self-conscious about her clothes, accent and lack of breeding. She feels closed out of the charmed circled of privileged girls, a prey to ``unutterable loneliness,'' but she feeds her soul with music and literature and with the memory of her father's admonishment to remember that the moon she sees in the sky is shining on him too. Vera finds some fulfillment in a lesbian relationship with another nurse trainee, and yearns for the love of an older staff nurse who has been kind to her. But when she thinks she has been befriended by a staff doctor and his wife, brought into ``respectable'' society at last, she is instead heartlessly exploited, seduced and betrayed. With her baby daughter, she faces a life of ``sorrow and futility.'' Vera's self-absorbed account is related against the background of WW II and the London Blitz, encapsulated in a few vivid images: a mournful procession of wagons bring the wounded men to the hospital; a young soldier's wound erupts with mag gots, which run over the bed and floor. Though the novel's segments do not always connect seamlessly, the motivations of several characters are not clear, and some Briticisms and allusions are obscure, Jolley's power to convey the anguish of sensitive, lonely people creates a haunting narrative.
