Black Inked Pearl by Ruth Finnegan

Black Inked Pearl by Ruth Finnegan

An epic romance about the naive Irish girl Kate and her mysterious lover, whom she rejects in panic and then spends her life seeking. After the opening rejection, Kate recalls her Irish upbringing, her convent education, and her coolly-controlled professional success, before her tsunami-like realisation beside an African river of the emotions she had concealed from herself and that she passionately and consumingly loved the man she had rejected.

Searching for him she visits the kingdom of beasts, a London restaurant, an old people's home, back to the misty Donegal Sea, the heavenly archives, Eden, and hell, where at agonising cost she saves her dying love. They walk together toward heaven, but at the gates he walks past leaving her behind in the dust. The gates close behind him. He in turn searches for her and at last finds her in the dust, but to his fury (and renewed hurt) he is not ecstatically recognised and thanked. And the gates are still shut.

On a secret back way to heaven guided by a little beetle, Kate repeatedly saves her still scornful love, but at the very last, despite Kate's fatal inability with numbers and through an ultimate sacrifice, he saves her from the precipice and they reach heaven. Kate finally realises that although her quest for her love was not vain, in the end she had to find herself - the unexpected pearl.

The novel, born in dreams, is interlaced with the ambiguity between this world and another, and increasingly becomes more poetic, riddling and dreamlike as the story unfolds. The epilogue alludes to the key themes of the novel - the eternity of love and the ambiguity between dream and reality.

Finnegan, Ruth: - Ruth Finnegan OBE, FBA, Emeritus Professor Open University. Her work has mainly been on oral performance, narrative, the ethnography of music, and communicating (including extra-sensory perception). Her publications include Oral Literature in Africa, The Hidden Musicians, Communicating: the Multiple Modes of Human Communication, Why Do We Quote? and, most recently, the novels Black Inked Pearl, Voyage of Pearl of the Seas, and The Helix Pearl. Born in Ireland, she now lives in Old Bletchley, southern England. Robin Horton, FBA Professor at the University of Port Harcourt in Rivers State, Nigeria, is an English social anthropologist and philosopher who, in a series of influential works since the 1950s, has challenged and expanded views in the study of religion and anthropology--most notably, his celebrated Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science. He has lived in Africa for four decades where he continues to conduct research on African indigenous religions, magic, mythology, and rituals.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781942146179
ISBN 10	1942146175
Title	Black Inked Pearl
Author	Ruth Finnegan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Garn Press
Year published	2015-08-24
Number of pages	322
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable