The Triple Goddess
by Ashly Graham
“In Love”...”Love”—which is which, and what is the difference?New and
fifteen years in the making, THE TRIPLE GODDESS is a novel about “In Love”.
About an obsession with the idea of one girl, one woman. It is three
stories—historical fiction, Arcadian fantasy, science fiction, combined with
traditional fairy tale--a novel in three parts: history rediscovered in the
present: a battle against the worst kind of evil in an English village...a
terrifying vision of the future as the end of the world approaches...starring
three women who are the same woman, the Triple Goddess of classical mythology
made flesh; three mysterious drop-dead gorgeous women whose creation was
inspired by a first, single, sun-blinding real-life encounter with a girl many
years ago when she was just sixteen, and then was lost to reality, like
Orpheus’s Eurydice, or Dante’s Beatrice...but not to the imagination that keeps
her present upon the page to whoever wishes to possess her.The sort of
girl whom one thinks about, dreams about, reads about-- perhaps like Don Quixote
did his Dulcinea-- every day, every night, until the day one dies: a
mind-stalking reality in thought.What if the real girl, now woman and
renowned, feels the same way? One may never know until one is no longer fated
but united in the stars. Until then, there is hope; and then there is
eternity.THE TRIPLE GODDESS is laugh-out-loud funny on every page, a
true entertainment. It is a battleship of Swiftian social satire, floating on an
ocean of irony, amidst a flotsam of Alice in Wonderland nonsense, and comical
and wry and black humour. But always glimmering on the horizon is tenderness,
romance, and thinking so wishful that every imaginative word makes fact pale
before truth.ARBELLA; OPHELIA; GLORIA:Arbella, a privileged but
unhappy 1980s London city girl, a Zuleika Dobson with whom every person who sees
her is willingly drowned in love, finds herself by walking into history at the
Tower of London and becoming re-involved with Sir Walter Ralegh and other famous
people from her aristocratic past.Ophelia is the distracted
earth-stopping and -mothering curate of a Sussex village—the lodestar fixation
of a once-young Archbishop of Canterbury--which becomes occupied by a very
unorthodox she-devil, the Big Cahuna herself, and her obnoxious but ridiculous
side-kick priest.Gloria is the visionary nursing sister, a Sheherazade
rather than a Florence Nightingale, on the experimental ward of London’s Exeat
Institute, the old Greenwich Hospital, where Director Hugo Bonvilian 4285D
directs the extraction of essences from the vivisected bodies of his ‘Impatient’
members of the Slave class, as part of the Project to avert the end of the
world.THE TRIPLE GODDESS is a modern day Arabian Nights’ Entertainments
of magical diversions that never quite end, and stories within the story. It is
a book to get lost in, or to read a page or a chapter at a time, and to reread.
It is a book that was written to change the lives of every reader in the way
that it changed, and continues to change, that of the writer.
fifteen years in the making, THE TRIPLE GODDESS is a novel about “In Love”.
About an obsession with the idea of one girl, one woman. It is three
stories—historical fiction, Arcadian fantasy, science fiction, combined with
traditional fairy tale--a novel in three parts: history rediscovered in the
present: a battle against the worst kind of evil in an English village...a
terrifying vision of the future as the end of the world approaches...starring
three women who are the same woman, the Triple Goddess of classical mythology
made flesh; three mysterious drop-dead gorgeous women whose creation was
inspired by a first, single, sun-blinding real-life encounter with a girl many
years ago when she was just sixteen, and then was lost to reality, like
Orpheus’s Eurydice, or Dante’s Beatrice...but not to the imagination that keeps
her present upon the page to whoever wishes to possess her.The sort of
girl whom one thinks about, dreams about, reads about-- perhaps like Don Quixote
did his Dulcinea-- every day, every night, until the day one dies: a
mind-stalking reality in thought.What if the real girl, now woman and
renowned, feels the same way? One may never know until one is no longer fated
but united in the stars. Until then, there is hope; and then there is
eternity.THE TRIPLE GODDESS is laugh-out-loud funny on every page, a
true entertainment. It is a battleship of Swiftian social satire, floating on an
ocean of irony, amidst a flotsam of Alice in Wonderland nonsense, and comical
and wry and black humour. But always glimmering on the horizon is tenderness,
romance, and thinking so wishful that every imaginative word makes fact pale
before truth.ARBELLA; OPHELIA; GLORIA:Arbella, a privileged but
unhappy 1980s London city girl, a Zuleika Dobson with whom every person who sees
her is willingly drowned in love, finds herself by walking into history at the
Tower of London and becoming re-involved with Sir Walter Ralegh and other famous
people from her aristocratic past.Ophelia is the distracted
earth-stopping and -mothering curate of a Sussex village—the lodestar fixation
of a once-young Archbishop of Canterbury--which becomes occupied by a very
unorthodox she-devil, the Big Cahuna herself, and her obnoxious but ridiculous
side-kick priest.Gloria is the visionary nursing sister, a Sheherazade
rather than a Florence Nightingale, on the experimental ward of London’s Exeat
Institute, the old Greenwich Hospital, where Director Hugo Bonvilian 4285D
directs the extraction of essences from the vivisected bodies of his ‘Impatient’
members of the Slave class, as part of the Project to avert the end of the
world.THE TRIPLE GODDESS is a modern day Arabian Nights’ Entertainments
of magical diversions that never quite end, and stories within the story. It is
a book to get lost in, or to read a page or a chapter at a time, and to reread.
It is a book that was written to change the lives of every reader in the way
that it changed, and continues to change, that of the writer.