Return From Darkness

‘Life is larger than life’! Myths can help us understand and find our way through this mystery with stories about Prometheus, Siddharthr, Gilgamesh, the Minotaur and countless other mythological figures coming down to us from the impenetrable shadows of ancient wisdom. ‘Boar’ looks at the Celtic myth of Twrch Trwyth as described in the Welsh Mabinogi and asks how it can act as a guide to modern men and women.

A headmaster tells a 6th form group, on a study course to Pembrokeshire, about an evil king who was turned into a boar as punishment. The boar is portrayed as being totally evil as he ravages and destroys life and property in middle Britain; he then moves to the west into the lands ruled by Arthur. After a long and brutal war, which moves to Ireland, back to Western Britain and finally to Land’s End, the boar plunges into the sea never to be seen again. The battle was between good and evil but at a deeper level it was about the lust for power, a lust that eventually corrupted Arthur himself.

Next day the headmaster departs alone and he too is never seen again. The book follows the lives of three of the sixth formers for the next quarter of a century as they move between New Zealand and Wales, Canada and the ancient Irish capital of Tara, the physical world of the senses and the mystical world of our essential essence and a confluence of characters who are not what they seem to be.

They come under the influence of an enigmatic recluse who, despite the pressing interruptions of their ambitions, their passions and their doubts, drags then deeper into the enchanted world of Twrch Trwyth and the changes in their lives it brings about. They are forced to confront doubts about whether the Boar was truly as evil as the Mabinogi portrays and a sinister threat to Verres by unseen ‘vested interests’ that threaten to destroy them all. The fate of their former headmaster is a recurring link between the past and the present and events come together in a violent battle in the ruins of a medieval castle leading to the passing by some of them through a ‘portal’ of standing stones into the ‘other’ world while those who remain return to face new challenges in both the physical and the mystical worlds. Myths never sleep!