Richard Godwin is a fascinating British crime writer who, like me, has a background as a poet. He also has a blog on his website (link at the bottom of the post) on which he holds the most thoughtful and reflective conversations with other writers. He has a great new novel, One Lost Summer, out now, and I'm pleased to have him with us talking about obsession and identity.
ONE LOST SUMMER AND IDENTITY.
One
Lost Summer is in many ways a novel about identity and lies. It
is about the lies people tell themselves to survive and the extent to which
they may remain unknown in a person’s character and by those closest to them. It
is about desire and obsession and it is about summer and the secrets your
neighbour carefully hides from you while he or she keeps up a facade.
This is a brief synopsis of the novel:
Rex Allen loves star quality in women.
He moves into a new house in a heat wave with few possessions apart from two
photographs of his dead daughter. His next door neighbour, beautiful Evangeline
Glass invites him over to one of her many summer parties, where he meets her
friends and possessive husband Harry. Rex feels he knows Evangeline intimately.
He starts to spy on her and becomes convinced she is someone other than who she
pretends to be. When he discovers she has a lover, he blackmails her into
playing a game of identity that ends in disaster.
One
Lost Summer is attracting some great reviews. Reviewers are
commenting on its tight suspense and haunted feeling, as well as the intense
drama that plays itself out between Rex and Evangeline and the breathtaking
ending. The narrative contains many surprises, not least those that come from
Rex’s past. But there are also the surprising revelations that occur in his
meetings with Evangeline, who he lures to his house once a week for two hours
to act out the part of Coral, a woman who remains a mystery until the end. She
may be nothing more than a figment of Rex’s imagination or she may be
Evangeline’s alter ego.
The central characters are altered by the sequence
of events one torrid summer. One of the things I wanted to explore when I wrote
One Lost Summer was the extent to which
the irrational governs peoples’ lives. And obsession is a key theme in the
novel. It is there in Rex, the first person narrator of the novel, as this
passage shows:
“Obsession is not a modern disease. Its roots lie
deep inside humanity and may be the reason we’re here. You don’t know you’re
obsessed until you can’t move, until all you see is the one thing. By then the tendrils have
wrapped themselves around your unsuspecting heart. They’re delicate at first in
their unfolding, touching you in the dark, like the soft caress of a lover at
dawn. Then you know they’re squeezing the blood out of you. And you realise you
will have to hack them away, and with them some living beating part of yourself
to be free.
I held the camera and captured her image again and
again that intoxicated summer when music filled the gardens of Broadlands
Avenue, and Evangeline was high forever.
Stars have a
rare quality, an ability to take away the smallness most men feel. They’re more
corrupt than us, but the corruption is better hidden, and their appeal is a
lie, the biggest drug you will ever know.
Evangeline was a complete balance of
all the qualities famous stars have. She knew she was a rare flame.
All that summer I watched her. I
caught her laughing, smiling, looking away from Harry, alone, contemplating her
day. I took her with shopping bags on the empty drive next door, and I filmed
her sunbathing by the pool, her body tanned and glowing in the unnatural sun
that seemed to set that time apart. For she seemed to exist outside time. And I
captured her and made her mine.
I spent my evenings with a glass of Montrachet
chilling my tongue as I sipped her image from the Plasma screen in my living
room. I fed on her. The X bridged the space between us. I zoomed in on her, caressing
her skin with the lens. I entered her world like a hummingbird penetrating a
flower, my heart beating like rapid wings. She existed in my watchfulness and
awoke my desire. When I wasn’t filming her, time was static. There were no
clocks in The Telescope. I felt erased when I wasn’t watching her image. My
house had no past and no future.
I tidied away unpacked boxes, placing them in
cupboards. I never used most of the rooms, existing in solitude, with only the
films I took. And I felt more and more that I was part of a plot, and my only
defence against it was the camera, as if Evangeline and Harry knew things that
they were keeping from me and the X would find them out. I felt chilled, as if
some lost piece of knowledge was frozen inside me. Sometimes at night as the
Glenfarclas wore off I could hear icebergs breaking in the distance, and then
the notes of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” would stab at my brain like shards of
glass against a nerve.”
BIO.
Richard Godwin is the author of
critically acclaimed novels Apostle Rising
and Mr. Glamour. One Lost
Summer is his third novel. It is a Noir story of fractured identity and
ruined nostalgia. He is also a published poet and a produced playwright. His
stories have been published in over 29 anthologies, among them his anthology of
stories, Piquant: Tales Of The Mustard
Man.
Apostle
Rising is a
dark work of fiction exploring the blurred line between law and lawlessness and
the motivations that lead men to kill. Mr.
Glamour is about a world of wealthy, beautiful people who can buy anything,
except safety from the killer in their midst.
Richard Godwin was born in London and
obtained a BA and MA in English and American Literature from King's College
London, where he also lectured. You can find out more about him at his website www.richardgodwin.net , where you can
also read his Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse, his highly popular and unusual
interviews with other authors.
One Lost Summer is
available at all good retailers and online
at
The Book
Depository http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/One-Lost-Summer-Richard-Godwin/9780956711342
Waterstones
http://www.waterstones.com/
You can
find out more about Richard Godwin at his website: http://www.richardgodwin.net/
Follow
him on Twitter https://twitter.com/stanzazone
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