The English novelist, Salley Vickers, author of Miss Garnet’s Angel, Instances of the Number Three and most recently Mr Golightly’s Holiday is an analytical psychologist who lectures on the connections between literature, psychology and religion and has worked as a university teacher of literature specialising in Shakespeare. This background is apparent in her novels, particularly Miss Garnet’s Angel and Mr Golightly’s Holiday, with their focus on issues of spirituality and belief in the contemporary world.
Vickers sees belief in God as a central feature of life today, even wars being fought over matters of belief, so that whether or not people believe in God they cannot ignore the idea of God. She says, ‘I think human beings are naturally spiritual … we live in an age where even if we are not participating in organised religion we are looking for something.’
She suggests that belief must evolve in the 21st century and that new forms and symbols must be found to represent belief if it is to have any meaning today. This is what she attempts to do in the stories of Mr Golightly and Miss Garnet.
Mr Golightly’s task while on a writing holiday in a Dartmoor village is to revise his unidentified ‘Great Work’ so that it will appeal to a new age of readers for whom ‘human nature hadn’t changed ... but custom had, and the times.’ He concludes after watching an episode of Neighbours that ‘the characters in his original drama were only apparently unlike those of the present day’, and that it is the idiom and episodes that need to be made relevant, not the essence of the work itself. His IT advisors, Mike and Bill whose real names turn out to be Michael and Gabriel help him find his way around one aspect of modern idiom, using email on golightly@golightly.com. There he communicates with the mysterious nemo@nemo.com, someone who doesn’t wish to be known but with whom he finds he has ‘an ancient language in common’.
This novel presents, through the actions and thoughts of the central character, the idea of an evolving God, one who is recreated, redefined and reappraised. As Mr Golightly evolves and changes in response to events, so do the people around him become less alienated and unconnected as their daily lives connect with his. In his dealings with his neighbours Mr Golightly lives out the advice given in Robert Orage’s epigraph for the