“Prayer, like a net closed on them at the altar,…”

G. F. GREEN: A Wedding

“…her face done white to round spider eyes,…”

This beguilingly disconcerting vignette also has a dislocating style, with June sunlight tactile and in motion alongside Bowenesque ‘psychological furniture’, staccato, abridged, with impatient syntactical hints of a more fulsome explanation that the 12 year old boy — at the wedding ceremony at the church and reception of his father’s remarriage to a woman called Phyllis — is drunk via this dislocated perception, i.e. firstly drunk with poetic near-meaninglessness via such a description of him as possibly induced by mourning his mother whose photograph we see, and then literally he is made drunk with champagne at the reception by another of this book’s importuner of an altar-boy, even if this boy’s altar was a different altar…but the boy stays safe by dint of his own stoical netting of nature and its ways around him? Even though still drunk while rowing his rocking boat left tethered by the lake? Unless I am beyond being able to steady the meaning of my own reading’s boat…

“Prayer, like a net closed on them at the altar,…”

***

The Penguin Anthology context of this review: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/915-2/