Dark Night of the Soul: Journey to Redemption

ISBN-13: 9781548066642 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 324 str.

Neville John Herrington

Opis

In this the final volume of the Brigid O'Meara Trilogy, the heroine, a beautiful Irish music hall dancer/singer who was drawn into gun smuggling during the 1895 Jameson Raid against Kruger's Boer Republic, and was incarcerated in a British concentration camp when she sided with the Boers during the Anglo Boer War, marries Willie Gray, the British Uitlander and revolutionary who she fell in love with during the turbulent period building up to the war. Now, in the aftermath of the war, Brigid undergoes a cathartic journey where she is forced to confront the demons of the past that she has kept bottled up inside her... the abortion she underwent after being raped by a diamond miner in Kimberley, the killing of him in an act of self defence when he pursues her and murders her fiance, together with the eighteen months of trauma she and her young son were subjected to in the concentration camp. Her passing into the dark night starts when she witnesses an exorcism performed on a young woman and, in her emotionally vulnerable state, she becomes the unwitting host for the demonic entity that leaves the victim during the ritual, and invades her psyche. The dark world she is projected into is a harsh one, far removed from the comfortable life she has created with Willie and her son Ritchie, but it is also a world that gives insights into the hypocritical social moralsand sanctimonious self-righteousness of the new ruling British colonials. It is a world which gives Brigid the freedom to take revenge on past enemies, but also one in which she has to face retribution for actions that have sun her into a deep abyss from which there seems no escape. Those who have read the first two books of the Brigid O'Meara trilogy would have shared in the many struggles and challenges, which this intelligent young Irish immigrant faced since arriving in Pretoria in 1895. When we meet her in the third book we initiallysee a loving mother and wife, believing that she has finally found a safe place to start a new life for her family.But we are soon to ask, how is it possible that within this secure, loving milieu could she possibly nd herself drawn into a situation where her values and self-worth are destroyed? How could she find herself consumed by evil in attempting to help a woman who had allegedly made a pact with the Devil? Brigid's dilemma resonates with the age-old question of why evil things happen to good people? Demonic possession is a complex and controversial subject, and this book does not set out to defend one or other position, but takes its inspiration from a true story involving a 16-year-old Zulu girl living in a Catholic mission station on the south coast of KwaZulu- Natal, who in 1906 made a pact with the Devil. She exhibited superhuman strength, could levitate up to five feet in the air as well as speak and understand several foreign languages previously unknown to her. Although the veridical evidence of her story is documented, the character of Nomsa in the book merely parallels her experience in the broadest sense of someone who likewise invites a demonic force into her life, and, in no way, presents a carbon copy. For those readers who believe in the possibility and reality of demonic possession there should be no problem in accepting the story line, but for those who don't, they may require a willing suspension of disbelief.