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Circuits by Susie Clinkard, begins:
It looked more like a wedding than a funeral.
The church was filling up rapidly. "I told you we should have booked the cathedral". The speaker was the deceased's mother, Christine. This was just the latest in a succession of vitriolic verbal swipes addressed to her ex-husband, Gerald Waterford, who shuffled uncomfortably on the narrow pew. They were already seated at the front of the small church, and had been there for about half an hour already; a very long half hour.
On Christine's left, from a wheelchair positioned side on to the pew, came a muffled, rumbling fart followed by a pause, then another, shorter blast. The pile of blankets shifted slightly and settled down once more. Soon snoring could be heard from deep within.
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Circuits was chosen as the title for Susie Clinkard's first full length thriller for several reasons.
Life itself is full of circuits. The circuits run alongside each other...people, plants, animals are born, grow and die...within those circuits there are others...the people who are twenty to thirty years into their own circuits of life, give birth to more, aiding the start of further circuits...they also see out their older relatives, assisting them to finish their own circuits.
There are other circuits; relationships start, blossom and die, or start, blossom and thrive...but eventually, they all finish either via break-ups or death.
EVERYTHING is a circuit...from the food you eat, going through the circuits of the digestive system...and out...less said about that! Petrol in a car, through the engine circuits...and evaporating away, finishing.
Circuits, the book, starts at the funeral of a man who has had an influence on many people. His circuit is over...The story relates, with the use of flash-backs just how he came to be dead at the young age of fifty. His name, Simon Waterford was gleaned from Susie Clinkard's love of crystal wine glasses...preferably full! Waterford make such crystal...an appropriate hidden suggestion, as the rim of a wine glass is again, circuitous.
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Circuits delves into the lives of the women Simon Waterford has loved and left, the children he has fathered, the business colleagues he has used and worked with. As you read Circuits, you develop a knowledge of just what turned this ordinary young man into a multi-millionaire; how his life, rather than being an ordinary circuit, was more a meteoric rise, exploding into the situation we find him in at the start of Circuits. Circuits makes you actually feel sympathy for him...yes, he has it all...but what must that be like, when 99% of the people at your own funeral are only there to see if you have left them anything, or to make sure they can do a deal after the funeral, enjoy the free food and drink at the wake...or just to see you in the ground? Was there anyone who truly loved him? How did he die? Circuits answers all these questions and more, leaving the reader to contemplate the circuits of their own lives more deeply...Long winter shadows, afternoon chill; life in the meadows is dormant or still.
The cuckoo has flown, the crowd has long gone. The driver's alone, but still he drives on.
And so it goes on, the search for the Grail. The circuit he's on, it is but a trail.
There's always a race that keeps us from grace.
If only we knew, if only he knew, the quest never ends for it never begins; the straight is all bends and nobody wins.
"Long Winter Shadows" Sir John Whitmore, circa 1964.
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