The Triple Goddess Arbella

‘In Love’...‘Love’—is there a difference between the state and the feeling, the emotion, as we understand them?THE TRIPLE GODDESS is a novel about ‘In Love’. About an obsession with the idea of one girl, one woman. It is three stories—the first, historical fiction; the second, Arcadian fantasy; the third, science fiction; all presented in a unifying context of traditional fairy tale.It is 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...each ‘starring’ three women who are the same person: the Triple Goddess of classical mythology made flesh......three mysterious drop-dead gorgeous women whose original was lost to reality, like Orpheus’s Eurydice, or Dante’s Beatrice...but not lost to the imagination that keeps her alive upon the page for whoever wishes to possess her......the sort of girl whom one thinks about, dreams about, reads about—as Don Quixote did his Dulcinea—every day, every night, until the day one dies: a mind-stalking reality in thought.Gloria is the visionary nursing sister, a Sheherazade rather than a Florence Nightingale figure, 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.In the year 2032 AD, when the world is in the grip of the Central State, a repressive oligarchy, Gloria Mundy is the nursing Sister on Ward One at the Exeat Institute, the old Greenwich Hospital, home to ‘The Project’ under the direction of the minotaur Director Hugo Bonvilian 4285D, who vivisects human 'Slaves' of the S-Class, one per day, in conducting his researches into trying to isolate an essential ingredient from their bodies that, if instilled into the alphanumerically superior officers, the As, Bs, and Cs who rule the world, would endow them with the eternal life that Man would have continued to enjoy in the Garden of Eden, had the Fall not occurred.Young Director Bonvilian is in love with the cool and calm Sister Gloria; but owing to his position and inarticulacy, and her lack of responsiveness to anything except his professional instructions, is unable to bring himself to attempt to establish a more personal connection.When the heavenly denizens, called Blenders, of a far-off star, Lightyear, discover that Mankind’s unnatural practices on Earth have set in motion the seeds of its own destruction, a hail of meteorites, the Intergalactic Alliance of Planets and Stars dispatches a spaceship to apprise Mankind of its plight: that unless it finds some antidote to the meteorites, the world will be destroyed just after teatime on Friday 13th April, 2033; and to offer the Blenders’ assistance in attempting to find a means of dealing with the approaching bane.The star Lightyear itself, being the outermost astral body in the universe, lies far beyond the meteoritic path...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; 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.