Vickers, Salley
Entry updated 3 April 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1948- ) UK poet and author, active from around 2000, most of whose work is nonfantastical. Mr Golightly's Holiday (2003) features a faded novelist who finds that, via some tentative musings about his next book, has become the Secret Master of the small village where he is staying; Jehovah is invoked. A literal reading of Where Three Roads Meet (2007; vt Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus 2008) as Fantastika may escape the tedium of treating as metaphor-clogged monologues the conversations between the dying Sigmund Freud and a Mysterious Stranger who reveals himself as Tiresias, and who visits the twentieth century via unexplained Time Travel to talk about many matters, including Oedipus (see Psychology). As with Brian Aldiss's Jocasta: : "Wife and Mother" (dated 2004 but 2005), Jocasta is presented as being equally significant with her husband; Freud evades any coming to terms with this. Vickers's depiction of the plague that devastated Thebes evokes premonitions of Pandemic. [JC]
Salley Vickers
born Liverpool, England: 1948
works (highly selected)
- Mr Golightly's Holiday (London: Fourth Estate, 2003) [hb/]
- Where Three Roads Meet (Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate, 2007) [in the publisher's The Myths series: hb/Hoo-Ha]
- Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus (New York: Canongate, 2008) [vt of the above: author's name given as "Sally" on title page: in the publisher's The Myths series: hb/]
links
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