by Craig Grimes
In 1598 a young Italian noblewoman named Beatrice Cenci murdered her abusive, rapist father. Her actions found many defenders but not the Romantic poet and pacifist Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, in his verse play The Cenci, condemned Beatrice's violent response.
The Romantics encapsulated the counter-culture of the Vietnam War era, but it was Shelley, in particular, who influenced the views of a young hippie, Lawrence MacQuigau, not only about pacifism and Beatrice Cenci, but about free love, atheism, and vegetarianism.
But Lawrence's convictions will soon be put to the test when he reads the journal of his recently deceased mother about a time, immediately after WWII when she was the only doctor in a small isolated town and sought to help a badly abused young woman after the church, the law and the town turned their back on her. The decisions his mother made are about to intrude into Lawrence's life and threaten his young family, forcing him to act.
That Recoil of Nature is a suspenseful novel that tells two stories of survival, and of the linkages between politics and gender politics. It explores the contagion and ethics of violence in the face of power under the shadow of two very different wars; and of people shaped by these experiences. There are no stock characters here. Their actions are complex and sometimes contradictory, and violence, we see, is something all of us are capable of.