Publisher's Synopsis
'In Love'...'Love'-is there a difference between the state and the feeling, the emotion, as we understand them? THE TRIPLE GODDESS is a novel about 'In Love'. About an obsession with the idea of one girl, one woman. It is three stories-the first, historical fiction; the second, Arcadian fantasy; the third, science fiction; all presented in a unifying context of traditional fairy tale. It is a novel in three parts: history rediscovered in the present; a battle against the worst kind of evil in an English village; a terrifying vision of the future as the end of the world approaches...each 'starring' three women who are the same person: the Triple Goddess of classical mythology made flesh... ...three mysterious drop-dead gorgeous women whose original was lost to reality, like Orpheus's Eurydice, or Dante's Beatrice...but not lost to the imagination that keeps her alive upon the page for whoever wishes to possess her... ...the sort of girl whom one thinks about, dreams about, reads about-as Don Quixote did his Dulcinea-every day, every night, until the day one dies: a mind-stalking reality in thought. Ophelia Blondi-Tremolo is the stunning and charismatic, fey, and oddball curate-with whom the now Archbishop of Canterbury has been besotted since as a junior bishop he ordained her-of a Sussex village that is invaded by a washed-up Devil Lady who has been forced out of Belgravia by younger more ambitious competitors. The 'DL', despite being condemned to an eternity of Hell, is feeling the pangs of self-recrimination and regret, and an impossible desire to reform. Setting herself up as the Lady of the Manor, the Devil Lady moves into the Old Rectory with her demon manservant, along with a raft of lesser demons and imps, and appoints a black-hearted, scurrilous-sermonizing, and foul-living priest, the Reverend Fletcher Abraham Dark, who has barely escaped being defrocked after serving in the stews of the East End, to further corrupt the already well-corrupted neighbourhood. Ophelia's ebullient female partner, Effie, and the many ghosts of the parish who are so attached to Ophelia, whose personality permeates the neighbourhood, that they find it impossible to go to the Light, take arms against the DL, who brings everything in her own arsenal to bear against them. Another powerful representative of the infernal regions arrives, a candidate for the rotating position of Devil itself: the glamorous Lady Violet Enderby, who occupies as her estate the hitherto unknown Moated Grange, a place accessible only by chauffeured airborne Jaguar motorcar, and instigates an exciting plan to bring the Church of England to its knees, not in prayer, but in scandalous disarray... THE TRIPLE GODDESS is a modern day Arabian Nights' Entertainments of magical diversions that never quite end, and stories within the story. It is a book to get lost in, or to read a page or a chapter at a time, and to reread; a battleship of Swiftian social satire, floating on an ocean of irony, amidst a flotsam of Alice in Wonderland nonsense, and comical and wry and black humour. But always glimmering on the horizon is tenderness, romance, and thinking so wishful that every imaginative word makes fact pale before truth.