Product Description
Althea: Do you believe in your own death? Every moment you are alive is endless and the present goes on and on with you inside it. Of course the end is truly coming, but it’s so far off, and in the meantime the spring bulbs need bringing out of the dark and the windows must be cleaned. These distant murmurings of unrest are like the way you sometimes hear your name on the wind and you shudder. Because it’s eerie that the wind should know your name.
Our hero, the recently divorced Michael Redhill, goes to Poland to get away from his life and to do some research on the Holocaust. Thwarted by witnesses unwilling to talk, he returns home via England, but in London is introduced to someone who can tell him a ‘real’ story of evil, and genocide. Through the memory of the storyteller, who served as a prison guard, he encounters an alleged war criminal with Alzheimer’s who is about to be put on trial, along with the man’s beautiful daughter and an attorney who is eerily similar to the criminal he’s prosecuting. But has the old man’s guilt dissolved with his memory? Could he be pretending to be ill in order to escape punishment?
Who do we believe? A prison guard still wounded by history? A writer suffering from heartache? A dying war criminal? Who does memory serve? Did the past really happen? And if it did, who has a claim on it?
Goodness is a morality tale for the modern age. This remarkable play, by the award-winning author of Building Jerusalem and Martin Sloane, is a Russian-doll: concentric stories enveloping each other, inhabiting the gaps between experiencing, telling and hearing.
About the Author
Michael Redhill is the publisher and one of the editors of Brick, a journal of things literary. His most recent books are Fidelity, a collection of short fiction; Martin Sloane, a novel that was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Trillium Award, the Torgi Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Books in Canada/Amazon Best First Novel Prize and won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book; Light-crossing, a collection of poetry; and Building Jerusalem, a play, which won a Dora for Best New Play and a Chalmers Award for Playwriting and was nominated for a Governor General's Award. He lives with his partner and two sons in Toronto.
CHB Titles by/with Michael Redhill:
Goodness
