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Peak, W: Oblate's Confession

Peak, W: Oblate's Confession

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vonPeak, William
Englisch, Erscheinungstermin 02.06.2020
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The Dark Ages, England: a warrior gives his son to a monastery that rides the border between two rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Growing up in a land wracked by war and plague, the child learns of the oath that binds him to the church and forces a cruel choice upon him. To love one father, he must betray another....

Informationen zum Titel

978-0-9904608-9-3
02.06.2020
2014
ja
eBook
416
San Antonio
Englisch
4347 kB
The Dark Ages, England: a warrior gives his son to a monastery that rides the border between two rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Growing up in a land wracked by war and plague, the child learns of the oath that binds him to the church and forces a cruel choice upon him. To love one father, he must betray another. The decision he makes shatters his world and haunts him forever. This quietly exotic novel places us compellingly in another time, another place, where chieftains fear holy men, holy men fear the world, and prayer has the primal force of fire. While entirely a work of fiction, the novel's background is historically accurate. In the midst of a tale that touches the human in all of us, readers will find themselves treated to a history of the Dark Ages unlike anything available today outside of textbooks and original source material.
Named one of the Best Indie Historical Novels of 2015 (Kirkus Reviews).
Also honored by the Catholic Press Association, the Independent Book Publisher Awards, and the National Indie Excellence Awards.
England.  The Dark Ages.  An elderly monk is ordered by his abbot to confess the terrible sin he committed as a child.  But where to begin?  One loose stitch unravels another.  A lifetime has passed since he found himself standing alone, a little boy in the snow outside an early, primitive monastery sited at the edge of a dangerous, still-pagan world.
He remembers the plagues he survived.  He remembers the wars.  He remembers the friends who survived neither.  He remembers struggling to understand a world inhabited by monks, grave men who, for the most part, used their voices only to sing the holy office. 
He remembers his father – the Anglo-Saxon warrior who donated him to the monastery, abandoned him there.  And he remembers the lone time his father returned, the price he exacted of his son, the awful secret he has carried since. 
His father.  All his life he’s been surrounded by men called “Father,” but who is his real father?  The distant stranger who came into his life that one time, abruptly, and just as abruptly left?  Or the silent fathers in their dark robes chanting their endless devotion to another, even more distant, Father?
The old monk returns, in memory, to the wild, forbidding mountain of Modra nect, and the rough hermit who long ago offered him a vision of sanctuary there. Perhaps the holy man gave him the answer, gave him the key. He writes to bring it back, to confront long-buried secrets, to retrieve the thread of his life in the face of abiding shame.

II

There are, of course, other memories from that first year at Redestone, though Father Dagan and the snowman remain my earliest. Working on this confession, trying to remember everything I can, I am sometimes surprised to find myself recalling what appears to be nothing more than a simple lump of wax, doubtless the trimmings from someone's tabulum. The memory surfaces, when it surfaces, unattached to any other. I don't know who would have given me such a thing or why the thought of it after all these years has the power to move me so, to make my mouth water as though I recalled not a useless bit of wax but a particularly choice piece of food. Perhaps, in the world of rules and obedience I had been dropped into, the thing's magic lay in the fact that it was malleable, that warming it in the palm of my hand I could force it to adopt whatever shape I liked...though I think color played a part as well, the subtle changes in hue wax may undergo if you observe it closely in the light. At any rate, whatever the attraction-and though I know it would have been wrong of me-I think I must have kept the thing, hidden it away in my bed, for the memory is often accompanied by a dim recollection of the scent (old, familiar, comforting) of my first mattress, a smell replaced almost immediately by the lighter more volatile scent of the wax itself, a fragrance which, nowadays, I associate with words, tabula, the material upon which I scratch out this draft.

When I try to remember how the abbey itself looked in those first days, it is not at all as you would expect. When we picture Redestone, we see the cloister, don't we, the green of the garth, the church on one side, the refectory, dortoir, and abbot's lodge on the other? We create in our minds a clear, if simple, view of the place. But this is not the way a child sees it, or at least not a very small child. When I remember my first days at Redestone, I see not a grand plan of abbey and grounds, but, rather, a series of seemingly insignificant images (the view from a window I was just tall enough to reach, a mossy bit of flagstone walk, the place in the church's south wall where, at mid-morning, the stones became warm and rosy), these were the reference points of my life, the little places that, in the aggregate, added up to my idea of the world. If the sun passed behind Modra nect each afternoon then as it does now, dousing the garth in shadow, I made no connection between the mountain and the change in light (if asked, I would have guessed, I suppose, that everywhere the world grew dim at the approach of Vespers). I must have been aware of the great terrace our monastery sits upon, must have seen the fields below, the village beyond, but I don't remember ever looking at these things-at least not in that first year or two-certainly don't remember ever thinking about them. I thought about food. I thought about the place at table where I sat. I thought about my bed. I thought about the spot along the church wall that on sunny mornings grew warm and rosy in the light.

As using a stylus to scratch out my tale upon this wax has reminded me of Father Dagan (the styli he used to make the arms on my first snowman), so, in a similar fashion, remembering my earliest images of Redestone brings Oftfor to mind, the absurd little tour I gave him the day we met, the things I said. As it happens, this is the same Oftfor that would eventually become so famous, though on the occasion I am remembering he was still just a boy like me, looking, as I recall it now, rather small and underfed. Though I can't be sure, my guess is it was the day of his oblation. It makes sense. I have a vague memory of strangers having been at the abbey at that time, the intense interest I always felt in grown-ups that weren't monks. And making it the day of Oftfor's oblation would explain why the two of us were out there alone on the garth like that, unobserved by anyone but the young postulant
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