Meridian
A beautifully written meditation on sexual obsession, religious mania, power and betrayal, Meridian follows one woman as she overcomes her blighted family history to experience enlightenment and ultimate forgiveness.
Mairin, a former WWI nurse married to a wealthy and dangerous man, embarks on a reckless love affair with a social outcast. During the course of their affair, she tells the following story:
A father, on a spiritual quest of his own, abandons his daughter to the negligent care of wealthy relatives. Returning to England, he tries to orchestrate a comfortable marriage for her despite her intention to become a painter. In an act of rebellion, she joins the war effort.
Deeply traumatized by her experiences as a nurse in France, and the deaths of her family in the influenza epidemic of 1919, she finds herself penniless and friendless in the libertine post-war era. Attempting to quiet her demons, she falls into frenzied sexual promiscuity until she meets an unforgiving and powerful man. However, she finds that her past will continue to haunt her until she can finally put it to rest.
Read an Excerpt from Meridian
Mairin is lying near a pool of water. She doesn’t know how she has gotten there. A cherub spits a trail of water at her. She looks up at a Baroque painted ceiling and recognizes the image of Chronos swallowing his young. She laughs.
A hand holds out a glass of champagne, and she gulps it down.
‘Quite a party.’
The voice hurts her head. It seems to be coming from the direction of a silvery man. She struggles to sit up. Her dress has bunched
up around her waist.
‘Darling. ’ It is not addressed at her. ‘What’s this, a straggler?’
‘Shhhh.’ The silvery man turns up his face, and a thin young man with pomaded hair kisses him.
‘Shall I have it thrown out?’
‘No,’ the silvery man says. He arranges her dress and picks her up.
‘She looks heavy,’ the young man sniffs.
She’s carried upstairs and deposited on large bed with a red silk cover. The silvery man wipes away her rouge with his finger and traces the outline of her eye.
‘Quite sweet, aren’t you?’
‘Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,’ she mumbles.
‘And literate,’ he laughs. He strokes her belly and briefly touches her between her legs, and then he is gone. Mairin wraps herself
in the silken spread.
♥ ♥ ♥
She’s dancing to the strain of a Negro band. ‘It’s jazz,’ the pomaded young man shouts in her ear. She nods her head, and then she is off. All eyes are on her as she takes the floor. She feels herself being lifted on to a table. She dances and dances, like she has never danced before. As she pirouettes, droplets of sweat spray off her body like tiny diamonds. She turns and turns to see them fall.
And then she falls into space, through dark water until she is resting on a seaweed bed, and cherubs look down at her in mock consternation.
The silvery man is back and undoes his robe. His naked body is white as glass. He rubs against her, and when that fails he puts his mouth between her legs.
Mairin hears the shrill echo of a whistle. She cups her hands over her ears, until she realizes the sound is inside of her.
‘Make it go away,’ she says.
‘What’s that?’ someone asks. It’s the silvery man.
She remembers now. She is sticky and hot.
‘I’m bleeding,’ she says.
‘It’s nothing.’ The silvery man wipes it away with his hand.
She wonders if she should be embarrassed or if it is the result of something that was done to her.
His robe undone, he slips one white arm out of the sleeve and shoots a needle into his vein. Mairin has seen it all before. He offers her the needle, and she shakes her head no. She has a horror of needles, of hatpins, of knives.
She knows he will be out of his head soon enough, and she lies quietly next to him until she can make her escape. When she is certain he will not budge, she enters the adjoining bath. The marble is cold against her bare feet, and she wonders where she has left her shoes. She rinses her face and blots a towel between her legs.
Back in the room, the silvery man snores. She looks out the window. She is in London, after all.
She finds her shoes next to an armchair and, slipping them on, runs down the stairs and out the front door. It is dark, and no one sees her leave.
What Readers say:
The characters depicted in the novel, ‘Meridian’, are as tragic as the story, which is set in the pre and post World War I era. A shocking story? Yes and no. If the reader is at all familiar with the history of that era, s/he will comprehend the entirety of the horror which transpired then. The Great Powers that fought that war, on the one hand: England, France, Russia and America, and on the other: Germany, Austria and Italy, destroyed millions of innocent human lives.
The protagonist of ‘Meridian’, Mairin, who is abandoned, without parental love or supervision and sexually molested by her uncle, passes through all the hardships of that era in her native England: unemployment, sexual libertinism and alcoholism, in addition to the terrible events she witnesses as a nurse on the battlefield.
This is a beautifully written erotic novel, and offers an exceptionally sensitive and intelligent treatment of Mairin’s descent into alcoholism and promiscuity in her attempt to obliterate the ugliest and most painful episodes in her life and eventually come to terms with her past.
Zlata Simic
Reading this novella is a bit like sailing. It takes a while to get going, but once the wind hits the sails you are transported across an ocean of life full of storms and passages of the purplest calm. Meridian is no light read. Both the sexual intensity and the revelations of horrors from the great war will not appeal to all, but the symbolic interplay and microscopic study of emotions and motivation are as magical and as riveting as Lawrence at his best minus the verbosity that tended to accompany his great works.
There is a huge amount of tension here, which carries on to the vey last page. Reflecting on the story I was reminded of Charlene’s hit in the late seventies ‘But I’ve never been to me’. There is certainly similarity, but then I realised that Mairin had never been to paradise, so there the similarity ends. Unlike many novels in this genre though, there is a question that needs answering. Whilst I have no doubt that parts were a joy to write, I cannot help feeling that some parts were difficult to write through the tears. There is also true to the novella’s structure a good deal of irony. It would appear for instance that Temmer like Jane Austin was completely enamoured and at home in the social scene of the elite. The truth is however that the post great war world was no place for the independent woman – as symbolised by the feisty but weak cousin Lucy. In fact Lucy is the perfect foil for Mairin in that she has no ‘real’ depth; she seems to ‘suck’ vitality out of everyone else. No, the ‘pre feminist’ lot of women was a very minute one, and I believe that LS Temmer detests the superficiality, artificiality and crassness that lie at the heart of ‘elitehood’. This, in many ways is also the heart of the work. The one character that was true to his ‘inner self, David, was ultimately destroyed by the ‘nonsense’ of the ruling class; “when young men are bartered for pride and profit, the transaction is called war” as Ponsonby so articulately put it. In many ways Conn is the closest character to David, but is a total cad; happy to squander life aimlessly at the expense of others.
This is a truly eloquent novella; exquisitely researched and beautifully written. Indeed the period when Mairin and Lucy are nursing in war torn Belgium is some of the most insightful writing of this period that I have come across; the reality and attention to detail are both startling and inspiring even though difficult to read at times.
I suppose my only criticism would be in the lack of ‘introspection’ during the novella that we get toward the end of part three, but this is probably more ‘wish’ on my part than real critique since I would love to have had the luxury of a weightier tome in my right hand that would have lasted just a little longer.
What a superb writer – what a wonderful work. I urge anyone who has an interest in social study, literature or the Great War to read this study of one family during a tumultuous period – I promise you, you will not be disappointed.
Paul Valentine
An engrossing and affecting story of a woman’s journey to self understanding, under the very difficult circumstances of Europe between the two world wars – particularly good at capturing the atmosphere and intricacy and ambiguities of life at the time. Overall, a very well done and highly readable account.
Lillian Foerester
If you enjoyed Meridian, read The Lens of Desire, a novel set in the glamorous Shanghai of the 1930’s and WWII