John Gardiner

Myths John Gardiner

Cast in a prose style fluid as the frames of a movie, this novel explores and projects onto the screen of the page remembered glories from the Greek Myths, embodied in dramatis personae living in the late-twentieth century. The Spirit of Antiquity has not vanished, its cadences echo on, and the dramatis personae of Myths surrender to the musicality of its genius. Thought, feeling and memory infuse the blazing landscapes in which the novel is set, rich with allusion and emotional impressionism, with resurrections of hope in the power of the human imagination to overcome the shadows of nihilism ever threatening to close in upon the world. All is illusion, the world rendered a vast movie set in these modern times, and the vision of the Myths being realised by the dramatis personae before the camera blends with their off-screen existence: reel life and real life are seamlessly blurred. Come to the two-dimensional page of this novel as you would a movie screen and allow the light of your own imagination play over the imagery, absorb the poetry, music and visual splendour of the evocations forming there, and be transfigured as the dramatis personae are. Myths, the novel, delivers a glimpse into an eternally refreshing universal vision of a view of the world embodied every morning as the sun crests the horizon, for here is a rhythmic power manifest in the poet Shelley?s famous lines concluding Prometheus Unbound ? to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates