Review
Sammy Mountjoy, son of a slattern, child of London's Rotten Row, looks back on his life seeking forgiveness, needing to forgive. Somehwere he ceased being the object of circumstance and became the subject. And in becoming the mover, attaining freedom, he irrevocably lost freedom. For as a child, subject to nightmares, clamoring at the pub door for his mother, accepting blows from the prim spinster teacher, learning "security" from the clergyman who adopted him, the young painter was free. But as the lover of a simple lower class woman whom he betrayed or of Taffy for whom he lusted and married, he was not free, but driven by the world of objective reality into a nightmare of grasping and destruction. And as a prisoner in a concentration camp, close to mental and physical death, the whole terrifying pattern of his existence reveals itself in a symphonic form. Themes are introduced, slowly, logically, until at the climax they merge, and Sammy, who knows that within him lies a dark force that bids him live, stands at the pinnacle of reality, a reality that embraces two worlds which will never be reconciled. Written by the author of Lord of the Flies, this chronicle of a modern man is reminiscent of Kafka. For here is a thematic novel of existence in which humor is filled with horror and order is the mask that chaos wears. Recommended for readers who seek more than entertainment from fiction. (
Kirkus Reviews )
Product Description
"I was standing up, pressed back against the wall, trying not to breathe. I got there in the one movement my body made. My body had many hairs on legs and belly and chest and head, and each had its own life; each inherited a hundred thousand years of loathing and fear for things that scuttle or slide or crawl." from Free Fall Sammy Mountjoy, artist, rises from poverty and an obscure birth to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War II, he is taken as a prisoner-of-war, threatened with torture, then locked in a cell of total darkness to wait. He emerges from his cell like Lazarus from the tomb, seeing infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. Transfigured by his ordeal, he begins to realize what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. He determines to find the exact point at which the accumulated weight of those choices has deprived him of free will.
