Many Mansions

As dreams of rock stardom fade and die, the yawning gap it leaves in our hero's life leads him to a major reassessment of his life-purpose. Missing his girl-friend Sarah, he moves, finding temporary work in London. At first Sarah resists the move, though she gradually becomes more comfortable with him the more he becomes so with himself. Aware of much in his past he needs to face, he at first seeks to reconcile himself to the Catholicism of his youth. This fails as dramatically as the bands, and for a time he thinks he is predestined for Hell. His fall-out exploration of other systems of belief emerges in contradictory ways, most prominently in a continuing preoccupation with eastern philosophies, Zen Buddhism especially. Finally (through an apparently trivial, random event) he finds himself drawn to the Quakers. His father, an American whom he has only met twice in his life, is a Quaker. This never particularly interested him before, but it intrigues him enough now for him to fly to New York to get to know him and his family better. From this, combined with his independent discovery of a form of Christianity he finds congenial, emerges a desire to work abroad, a form of service. To finance this, he takes on a range of different jobs, all of which turn out to be growth-points in different ways. Among the memories of his past life that he now confronts are those of his schools, from whose class exclusivity he is now as estranged as he is from their Catholicism. His return as a visitor to school and college triggers other ironies and revelations, and John Gerard is well on the way to replacing earlier stories with a fresh new narrative, one self-made rather than conditioned by either of his parents, or his education. Throughout he is haunted by another apparently chance event, to which can be traced his growing delusion, born of a literalistic belief in prophecy, that he is not Christ but Antichrist. This is so alien to the Quaker approach, that he conceals it from them as he perseveres in attending their meetings. When he applies to work in the Third World, the Quakers find him 'too wild for them', and sponsor him to work with Operation Omega, an anarchic aid agency in Bangladesh. As our hero reaches Bangladesh in the last chapter, it is already more home to him than Kew, Cambridge, or even New York ever were, let alone any of Gerard's various stopping-places on the way.