I would like to say something about how I feel in general about what a novel, or any story, ought to be. It’s a quotation from Kafka. He said, “A boo… - Nadine Gordimer

The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.

Strong emotion - faith? - has different ways of being manifested among the different disciples within which people order their behaviour.

There were other gadgets, noticed about the settlement, she privately recognized as belonging to her: a small garden knife-grinder that had been in the mine house kitchen before her own, a pair of scissors in the form of a stork with blades for beak that she actually saw in July's hand when he reproached the old woman for trimming his baby's toenails with a razor blade. These things were once hers, back there; he must have filched them long ago. What else, over the years? Yet he was perfectly honest. When he was cleaning the floor, and found a cent rolled there, he would put it on Bam's bedside table. They had never locked anything, not even their liquor cupboard. If she had not happened - by what chance in a million, by what slow certain grind between the past and its retribution - to be here now, she would never have missed these things:so honesty is how much you know about anybody, that's all.