Morant

Roy Goddard

2022

David Morant recalls the fate of a generation that cleaved to a preposterous idea - the notion that society could be ordered justly and that lives might be lived more freely and passionately. His generation experienced a moment, a sense of an opening into difference. But as the decades wear on, Morant has come to face the failure of that possibility, witnessing the rise of an obliteratingly monolithic, glitteringly violent and sterile order that permits no alternative way of being.

Teacher, moralist, slightly embarrassed sports jock and unintentional libertine, worried always about violence, not least his own, David Morant picks through the wreckage of his times to understand what happened and whether the old commandment to enjoy this life and to change the world still has meaning.

Morant is the disjointed, impure text that results from that effort.

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"As a memoir, the text is pensive, repetitional, and in search of chronically unavailable meaning. As an exemplar, the text is redeemingly useless." -- Heavy Feather Review

"There is no target audience. It isn’t the difficult second novel, nor a audacious first novel... It’s not seeking to place itself anywhere, in between this author or that, as a response to her, a critique of him, or any kind of new departure... Over and above the stuff on education – which is just interesting, and the insight into a particular time and place – this is a novel that’s good – in the way Woolf or James or Joyce is good. Its characterisation, its structure, its pace, its narrative, its literariness; its novel-ness, its new-ness, and its odd-ness..." -- A Useful Fiction

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ISBN 978-1-7397708-3-9