Finally Getting It.

I’ve nearly finished re-reading my novel, Odyssey, as reported in earlier posts. Just one short chapter left now, and it’s only the epilogue. Annie and Rabbit have gone, Brendan is alone again, and the journey is over.  I’m more than a little sad about that, and being sad is what’s given me the clue as to why I really wrote it in the first place.

At the time I thought it was about taking my writing activities to another level. I’d written about forty short stories – many of which had been published – and a novella, and now it was time to prove to myself that I could write a longer work. And so I did. And, as was usual with all my stories, I let it come to me in its own way rather than following the academic route of planning and structuring and so on. When it was finished I realised that it would be too short to interest a mainstream publisher, so I self-published it with Lulu (of somewhere in South Carolina I think) who had access to the major book retailers.

One woman who bought it wrote to me. She said that she had enjoyed it because she had read it to her mother who liked rabbits. ‘Is that it?’ I thought. ‘Is that all she’s got from it?’ Rabbit is, indeed, a most engaging character, but the book is about very much more than Rabbit’s personality. But that’s ego for you. Ego is petulant. It stamps its feet, crying: ‘All my fancy words and deep thoughts falling like fecund seeds onto stony ground. How very disappointing.’ Indeed, and how very childish. What it’s really about is this:

This book is the most powerful, the most accessible, the most engaging book I’ve ever read. Truly it is. But only to me, because it only relates to me. This was my journey, and there’s no earthly reason why it should be anybody else’s. And so it really doesn’t matter whether anybody else reads it, and if they do, what they think of it.

At the end of the main narrative, the enigmatic and other-worldly being known simply as Annie gives the simple human known as Brendan her final words on the point of it all. She tells him, among other things, that he shouldn’t force the spiritual road, that he should relax his search, follow the path, and let the learning come to him in its own way and its own time. And that’s what I’ve done.

All my old certainties have gone. My tendency to proselytise has gone. Now I walk and wait, brushing off the self-righteous rhetoric of religionists and atheists alike. And when the path offers the odd little revelation here and there, I take it in, roll it around my mind, and decide whether I like the taste of it or not. Whether that’s a good thing or not I’m in no position to judge. But it feels right.

It seems, however, that there has been a price to be paid. The last ten years since I wrote the book have been the darkest, stormiest and most depression-inducing ten years of my life, yet still it feels like the right path to walk. And that’s why I’m glad I put a dedication at the front of the opus, which simply says:

To Aine. With thanks.