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- Virago
- Virago
Virago Modern Classics, Fiction, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Classic fiction (pre c 1945), Religious & spiritual fiction
Syliva Townsend Warner pursues the psychology of the story with beautiful accuracy' John Carey
The Reverend Timothy Fortune, ex-clerk of the Hornsey Branch of Lloyds Bank, has spent ten years as a South Seas Island missionary when a 'maggot' impels him to embark on what he describes as a 'sort of pious escapade' - an assignment to the even more remote island of Fanua, where a white man is a rarity.
Mr Fortune is a good man, humble, earnest - he wishes to bring the joys of Christianity to the innocent heathen. But in his three years on Fanua he makes only one convert - the boy Lueli, who loves him. This love, and the sensuous freedom of the islanders produces in Mr Fortune a change of heart which is shattering...
Beautifully imagined, the paradise island and its people are as vivid as a Gauguin painting. Told with the driest of wise humour, touching and droll by turns, its theme - that we can never love anything without messing it about - is only one of the delights of this enchanting book.
Praise for Mr Fortune's Maggot
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One can't be too thankful that Miss Townsend Warner has lived to discover the alchemist s' secret of transmuting the past and the possible, and even the impossible now and then, into pure gold - HILARY SPURLING, OBSERVER
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One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers - HERMIONE LEE
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One can't be too thankful that Miss Townsend Warner has lived to discover the alchemist s' secret of transmuting the past and the possible, and even the impossible now and then, into pure gold - HILARY SPURLING, OBSERVER
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One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers - HERMIONE LEE
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