The Divine and the Decay
| Author | Bill Hopkins |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | MacGibbon & Kee |
|
Publication date
|
1957 |
| Pages | 234 |
The Divine and the Decay is a 1957 novel by the Welsh writer Bill Hopkins. It has also been published as The Leap. It tells the story of the leader of a British right-wing populist party who has decided to have his internal rival assassinated. To provide an alibi for himself he stays on a small Channel Island, where he becomes fascinated by a very self-possessed young woman. It was Hopkins' first and only published novel.
Peter Plowart, the leader and co-founder of the right-wing populist New Britain Party has decided to have his party co-founder assassinated due to internal conflicts. He travels to Vachau, one of the Channel Islands, to hold a speech and thus give himself an alibi while the assassination is carried out. On the island he finds a young woman whose self-possession intrigues him and makes him want to conquer her. When the woman finds out about Peter's real reason for staying on the island, she decides that he has to die. A power struggle takes place between the two.
According to Bill Hopkins' friend Colin Wilson, the book had its background in the nightly conversations the two had in Paris in 1953. Both Hopkins and Wilson admired a set of authors active around year 1900—George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton and Anatole France—and preferred these to the generations which had followed. Wilson attributed this to the atmosphere of defeat in the works of later generations; he exemplified this with the treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche in Bertrand Russell's influential A History of Western Philosophy, where Nietzsche's use of the word "will" is reduced to being associated with Nazi Germany. According to Wilson, both he and Hopkins found "will" to be "the only valid starting point for philosophy", and they both found Nietzsche's phrase about "how one becomes what one is" to be of central value.
The fictional island of Vachau is based on Sark. Hopkins visited Sark in 1956 to do research for the novel.
...
Wikipedia