David Arthur reviews Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam Peter Owen Ltd, London, 2002. £15.95 hardback. ISBN 0 7206 1176 8 There are certain unfortunate conditions that people tend to find slightly comic (unless they suffer from them themselves, of course). Bunions are one such. Despite being an object of humour, they are surprisingly debilitating. It is perhaps not altogether surprising, therefore, that Wendy Perriam inflicts the heroine of her fourteenth novel with bunions. It gives her another opportunity to exploit her formidable skill in writing bitingly acute black humour.
Our heroine-martyr, Lorna, is beset with an unsatisfactory husband, a propensity to panic attacks, and the aforesaid bunions. This last puts her, after a botched operation, in the Fawlty Towers of nursing homes, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and a number of other things besides. It is one or two of the episodes in this setting which earned the author, not for the first time, the doubtful honour of being presented with the Worst Sex Award — though I don’t think she’ll mind that for a minute.
Actually I think the award was unjustified, and the amount of sex in this book is rather less than in some of Wendy’s others; and, in this context, rightly so.
I’m not going to tell you any more of the plot, as I want you to read the book. Perriam is, as the Herald Tribune remarked, "gifted with devastating powers of observation", and these are put to good use in her description of the relationship between Lorna and her husband Ralph, which is apparently doomed — or is it? Even more penetrating is her treatment of the trauma and suffering with which people prone to panic attacks are only too aware. Lorna’s "Monster" crops up regularly with its gloomy prognostications for any potentially perilous situation, and intervenes in her inner ear in the middle of consultations with her surgeon, while she is preparing dinner, at any time at all.
Tread Softly is both funny and poignant; it is a very good book. I do not think it is quite her best book - for my money, Lying still has the honours — but it is well up to standard and well worth reading.
David Arthur is the SoF Treasurer and a member of the Yorkshire Group. sof 61 September 2003 David Hart reviews Believing in Nothing and Something: an Approach to Humanist Beliefs & Values . «= by Geoff Heath Bowland Press Chesterfield 2003, pp.144, £9.95p, ISBN 0-954422 1-0-4 (Students in full-time Higher Education may purchase a copy at £5 from The Multi-Faith Centre at Derby University, Kedleston Road, Derby DE22 | GB, with photocophy of student card or current registration document.) This is a very timely book, emerging this year as something of an English philosophical commentary on ‘the war on terror’ and some of the implications of the terrifying combinations of naive realism and nihilism that now stalk the political capitals of the western powers, and usually wreak their worst elsewhere in our fragile globe. In the course of his argument Heath calls 'the war of terror’ a sort of American jihad, and argues cogently that believing what might be the case (on the part of certain politicians) is no justification for killing innocent people. He goes back to the English radicals (whom Tom Altizer castigated us for so much neglecting) and specifically to Milton - who argued that there was no truth that would justify persecution. He also has a chilling epigram from Nietzsche: 'Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this strangest of guests?’ As so often is the case, some biographical background helps illuminate the philosophical substance. Geoff Heath started out as an inner-city clergyman in the 1960s, ministering in the challenging situation of the Bow Mission as an ordained Methodist minister while Honest to God was simmering on the South Bank. As if that was not soulsearing enough, he then spent a period of ministry among the mining communities of the Worksop Circuit in the Midlands before resigning his orders and eventually becoming Principal Lecturer in Counselling and Human Relations at the University of Derby. With such a distinguished ministerial and academic pedigree, he is clearly a firm supporter of the innovative work of The Multi-Faith Centre at Derby University, and hopes that it can, once built, (in 2004.ed.) become a meeting-point for those who believe and for those who don't.
Review of Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam, Peter Owen Ltd, London, 2002, £15.95 hardback, ISBN 0 7206 1176 8.