ODYSSEY OF A QUIET MAN.
Part One. Part Two.
Charlie And Iris. The Quiet Man.
‘The weight of the cross that you bear is measured by the guilt in your heart.’
Having lived and worked in the areas mentioned in the two stories, over time the significance that those areas had on my life became more apparent to me. As a result I became interested in the history that they had to offer, not so much the recent past, but the past which in itself was a period of transition which not only had immense ramifications on the particular areas that I refer to in my stories, but that of England the country they are a part of.
So it was that I set out with the sole intention of using the history and conditions of specific periods in time to place my stories in, and the periods I refer to are from the late Victorian era, to the dawn of what is commonly referred to as the new Elizabethan.
Odyssey Of A Quiet Man therefore is two stories, with the first, ‘Charlie and Iris’ leading directly into the second ‘The Quiet Man’. Two stories of ordinary, unimportant people finding their own paths through the difficulties of the times that they lived through, and yet, each having links, not only through blood but through the consequences that are dealt out by the inexorable hand of fate.
And through the stories I have endeavoured to look in depth at the inner workings of the characters involved, at their strengths and failings, at their motivations to survive the very real hardships and adversities of their periods in time. Periods in time that I feel their twenty first century descendents would be incapable of coping with, let alone fully appreciate the tenacity of spirit that their forebears must have possessed.
Therefore, I leave you to hopefully enjoy something that has given me a great deal of satisfaction in writing. And in so doing, I trust that the stories will at least provide the reader with a thought provoking experience which will lead them to either question or endorse the actions of the characters and the subsequent outcomes.