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Amazon
Jacobyte Books
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Category:
Mainstream
Publisher: Jacobyte Books
ISBN-10: 740530780
Type: Fiction
Pages: 435
Copyright: Jun 1 2001
The second part of the Torbay trilogy, Paths of Error, Constant Change charts the disillusion of Blue, through his various loves, from Western society and into Buddhism. That Buddhism, his version, he brings back to England, and has it thoroughly tested - through more love affairs, politics, grief, parenthood....
More a triptych than a trilogy, Paths of Error gives us 3 views through the same window of time. In this the second book, Constant Change, the main character, Blue, begins as an idealist with no ideals. His way is found through women. Rejected by his first girlfriend he drifts into the Merchant Navy, jumps ship in Sri Lanka. Through an American girl there he discovers Buddhism. In London, through an Irish girl, he comes back to boozy earth with a bump . The mother of his children, met in a squat, leads him to a brief rural idyll...
Excerpt
She had opened her sweet warm flesh to his knowledge. Two hours ago all that he had known of her had been her white face and her sharp red hair. Now he knew that on her shoulders was a dappled mosaic of flat pale freckles. Now he knew her nipples - two clusters of cherry pink bubbles. Now he knew the two taut muscles of her stomach, her inverted belly button like a tiny cauliflower. Now he knew her variety of hair: the red glossy hair stabbing into the angular crook of her white shoulders; the furze of down glowing on the silhouette of her slender arm; the armpit hair as soft as a mouse's fur; on her rounded abdomen the thin herringbone line of ginger hairs widening into, curling into the neat circular patch of crimson-glinting hair; and that hair parted by two glistening meat red lines, like an unhealed scar. He had been in there, inside her raw flesh.
His mouth, his hands, his body was saturated with her scents - of animal musk, of dried shampoo, of tiny particles of aromatic salt. He wanted to be alone, to be away from her in clear air, to hold in his mind all that she had given him. No words he knew could express his burdening gratitude. Nor action. To owe so much to one person. He wanted to sit alone and think, to knit this new knowledge into the old, reconcile rumour to fact. To piece together all the images she had given him. Freely given him. He wanted to shout his joy. Secretly. To be still lest this fragile treasure tumble to pieces.
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