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A Jealous God
Bored by her marriage with Eric, ambivalent about her children, and ridden with guilt about her aged mother, Helen Harding is at an age when memory begins its slow and pernicious invasion of the present.
Unexpectedly she meets up with her estranged stepbrother Michael and finds herself precipitated back into a past that has long been shut away - a childhood haunted by the mythic figure of her father, who died in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and a womanhood dominated by her conflicting love for Michael himself and her father's brutal, disturbing friend Dennis Killin.
Helen's quest for the jealous god of the past is set against a shifting backdrop of England, Cyprus, and Israel. With sensitivity and perception the novel explores a woman's life and the forces that act upon it. Who is the father of Helen's daughter? What was her own mother's relationship with Killin? And above all, what really happened to her father in those tormented days when the British Mandate in Palestine drew to a bloody close?
Unexpectedly she meets up with her estranged stepbrother Michael and finds herself precipitated back into a past that has long been shut away - a childhood haunted by the mythic figure of her father, who died in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and a womanhood dominated by her conflicting love for Michael himself and her father's brutal, disturbing friend Dennis Killin.
Helen's quest for the jealous god of the past is set against a shifting backdrop of England, Cyprus, and Israel. With sensitivity and perception the novel explores a woman's life and the forces that act upon it. Who is the father of Helen's daughter? What was her own mother's relationship with Killin? And above all, what really happened to her father in those tormented days when the British Mandate in Palestine drew to a bloody close?
319 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1993
About the author
Simon Mawer
40 books341 followersSimon Mawer was a British author who lived in Italy.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 1, 2014
Another amazing novel by Mawer. This is only the second book I've read with zero reviews on GR's. I'm really surprised, as Mawer writes intelligent prose & is one of my favorite living authors. I seldom give a plot synopsis in my reviews, since there is no need to duplicate the publisher's or GR's descriptions. But since so little has been said for this one, I'll make an exception.
As with all of Mawer's books, this is multilayered with flashbacks to previous events/times. Helen loses her father, Andrew Harding, in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. Was he a victim or a traitor? She has a love/hate relationship with her mother, a beautiful woman who attracts men of all ages. During the troubled times of the British Mandate, we follow Helen, her mother, new step-father, step-brother, Michael (an important part of the puzzle) from Israel to Cyprus where they run into an old friend of the father, Dennis Killin, who knows more about the circumstances surrounding Harding's death. Mawer explores hidden motives, divided loyalties and his repeated themes of religious devotion and sexual desire. In "A Jealous God" he offers all this, and more, leaving the reader with much to think about.
I find it interesting that although this book revolves around events in the 1940's, the Arab-Israeli conflict may have shifted a bit, but has not gone away.
As with all of Mawer's books, this is multilayered with flashbacks to previous events/times. Helen loses her father, Andrew Harding, in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. Was he a victim or a traitor? She has a love/hate relationship with her mother, a beautiful woman who attracts men of all ages. During the troubled times of the British Mandate, we follow Helen, her mother, new step-father, step-brother, Michael (an important part of the puzzle) from Israel to Cyprus where they run into an old friend of the father, Dennis Killin, who knows more about the circumstances surrounding Harding's death. Mawer explores hidden motives, divided loyalties and his repeated themes of religious devotion and sexual desire. In "A Jealous God" he offers all this, and more, leaving the reader with much to think about.
I find it interesting that although this book revolves around events in the 1940's, the Arab-Israeli conflict may have shifted a bit, but has not gone away.
October 26, 2023
Ii've read with great excitement several of his books - the Trapeze, Glass House, Mendel's Dwarf. So by comparison, this is a bit of a dud. Not at all bad, just not as brilliant as most. The basic idea is a British soldier fighting in a tense place - Jerusalem at the moment of the creation of Israel. He more or less runs off from his British wife and daughter (back in England), falling in love with a Jewish activist who is fighting the British. The plot is mostly his daughter decades later trying to figure out what happened.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews