Three Blind Executioners

Not just fantasy, but a unique blend of 'clear-minded surrealism' and mischievous earthy satire, directed to achieve a powerful end...

Philip Goddard wrote five novels from 1990 to 1993, and Three Blind Executioners is the last of these. He was at that time gestating as a significant symphonic composer, and he approached his literary works as though they were music compositions, indeed all five novels and some of his short stories and poems actually being the literary equivalent of complex, organically structured symphonies, in which ideas, phrases and even individual words are treated like melodic motifs in such a symphony. At that time his particular model of symphonic organization and structuring was the late symphonies of Sibelius and especially the symphonies of the 20th Century Danish composer Vagn Holmboe - though Goddard's own musical symphonies, when they did come, were more diverse in approach.

Each of the novels defies standard (say, BISAC) categorization, overlapping equally with a number of categories - which means that labelling with any one of those categories would misrepresent the respective work.

On what is destined to be remembered by many as Good Saturday, darkness and earthquake come to Dave Unglebury's very own town of East Thruxted; he has chanced upon the lynching and crucifixion of Fred, the new supposed 'Messiah'. On the Third Day an extraordinary letter arrives amongst Dave's mail, resurrecting a childhood ambition of his; it is an invitation to join a team of eminent mountaineers to ascend a new and extremely challenging route up the South-West face of Mount Everest. The catch is that Dave is no mountaineer and cannot imagine why such an invitation has come his way - except for the possibility that a monumental boob has occurred as a result of the similarity of his name to that of a very famous mountaineer, Dave Inglebury. Unbelievably, however, when the 'error' is pointed out to the team organiser, he insists that there is no error, both Daves being in the computer list, and indeed both having been invited.

The ambiguity implicit in the novel's title, which in the first instance refers to Dave's phobia of mice, is the starting point of a surrealistic linking of images that cloak the narrative with mystery and menace, leading us through a succession of phantasms and bogeys, which culminates in the final denouement upon Mount Everest that is suggested in the subtitle. This is the focus for an eventual startling - even traumatic - fusion of title and subtitle images in an unexpected way. And the betrayal referred to is only the last of several betrayals and let-downs that beset Dave on his progress toward the highest point on earth to which Man can aspire...