The Invisible Worm - Softcover

Johnston, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747262594 ISBN 13: 9780747262596

Publisher: Tinder Press, 1999

Synopsis

It starts with a funeral. The great and the good have assembled: the President has sent a representative, and dignitaries are there in force. And Laura remembers those two terrible events. But was the tragedy out at sea an accident Was the experience in the summerhouse cause rather than effect With wonderful delicacy and economy, Jennifer Johnston has stripped bare the lives of a family overwhelmed by more than one of the deadly sins. The Invisible Worm contains greater power and passion than most novels three times its length.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

In luminous prose, with dialogue as exact as Henry Green's, acclaimed Irish author Johnston (Fool's Sanctuary, 1988, etc.) strips away the perfect outer layers to reveal "the invisible worm" that destroyed an apparently golden family that's rotten at the center. When Laura Quinlan's famous father dies, his funeral is attended by the Irish President, and the distinguished congregation seems to Laura to "dance in celebration of her father's life." But Laura, always stirred by "the tremors of memory," recalls her long-dead mother, "who didn't succumb to his enormous charm. [Or]...perhaps she had indeed succumbed, and thereafter had to protect herself from it." Increasingly reclusive now after her father's death, Laura has also suffered periodic breakdowns in the past. In the present, over the period of a year, Laura lives in her beautiful inherited estate with her husband Maurice, a splendidly realized character--part bluff businessman, part perceptive admirer; and, during this time, Laura finally comes to understand what had really happened to her family over 20 years ago. Childless and 37, she spends her days gardening, which leads to her decision to clear away the growth about an old summerhouse. As she proceeds to do this, interrupted by another breakdown, she's helped by admiring Dominic O'Hara, a former priest teaching at a local school. After a cathartic bonfire, she tells him about the fact that she'd fled to France for two years after her father raped her as a teenager--an act responsible for her mother's death (a suicide, not an accident); for her marriage of escape to Maurice; and for "the emptiness of living" that had followed. She had forgiven her dying father, but only now can she tell the story "right to the end." From a writer with great gifts: a story told with riveting intensity and a wise sympathy for the quirky workings of the human heart. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tinder Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0747262594
• ISBN 13: 9780747262596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192