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A Dark Wind
By Celia M Gunn
Drawn by the faint, meandering sound of a Native North American flute from deep in misty English woodland, Kathy, a young bank-clerk in a northern provincial town, discovers Joe, a middle-aged Navajo Indian with a life-hardened experience of failed marriages and addictions.
Their unlikely meeting, challenging both age and culture, kindles an edgy yet mutual passion, entwined with the acting-out of a contemporary Arthurian drama set against a wild Northumbrian landscape of myth and legend, leading to fateful consequences for both their lives.
| A Dark Wind (RRP £8.95) |
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Direct from the author and signed:
UK £8.00 (incl. p&p) |
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| EU £10.00 (incl. p&p) |
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| Rest of world £14.00 (incl. p&p) |
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A Dark Wind
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS BOOK
“A magnificent invocation of sexual passion ... stunningly evocative ... intense and gripping.”
Moyra Caldecott, author of Etheldreda, Guardians of the Tall Stones and Akhenaten, Son of the Sun.
“Wonderful images ... a real heart-wringer ... positively Maupassant.”
Grethe Hooper-Hansen, writer and educator.
“A resonance of mystical heritage ... a subtle, deeper dimension ... intriguing and memorable.”
Archer Endrich, composer of Crossing the Dark Rift.
“Earthy and erotic ...”
Chrissy Philp, author of One Way of Looking at Man and The Golden City: Reality Model for a New Age.
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Celia Gunn’s new novella is an extremely potent effusion, both romantic and erotic, which tells of a life-changing encounter between a young Englishwoman, Cathy, and Joe, an American Navajo Indian.
Anyone who has read Celia’s remarkable autobiographical work, A Twist in Coyote’s Tale, will see where her inspiration lies. A Dark Wind is set in Northumberland where Celia grew up, and the background to it is a film crew on location for a movie about Lancelot, the champion, rescuer and clandestine lover of Guinevere, in the aftermath of Arthur’s death.
The Arthurian legend - some researchers argue Arthur was based in the North of England and not in Wales or the West Country - forms an emblematic counterpoint to the taut, psychological realism of the book’s main theme. Altogether, it’s an audacious contrivance but it draws the reader deeply into the strange and sometimes malefic alchemy of the cross-cultural relationship of Cathy and Joe. Mythopoeic imagination and a kind of tough sentimentalism - if that’s not too oxymoronic a phrase - lift the narrative into heady realms.
Significantly, for me, the principal characters evoke the union of opposites in the archetypal form of the hierosgamos or “chymical wedding”, where the soul mediates between body and spirit. Likened to the storm and the rainbow, the couple enact the mysterium coniunctionis through the spiritual water represented by the sea, which stands for the life principle and marriage-maker between man and woman.
This is a memorable and mystical love story which functions both symbolically and viscerally - cascades of striking similes scorch the imagination like sparks from a flint - and envelopes the reader richly in the renovating power of myth.
Geoff Ward, journalist and author of Spirals website: http://www.mysteriousplanet.net/ |
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