Ian Prattis

Redemption: a Novel Ian Prattis

This novel was a "lost" manuscript, first written in 1975, forgotten until spring 2011. The narrative was vivified with hindsight from the writer's eyes forty years later. The story is an allegory for life difficulties experienced by the author at that time. He was a real mess. Despite his desperate state of mind, this novel emerged. Redemption is set in the Hebrides, islands off the northwest coast of Scotland, with startling cycles of maturing and downfall of the epic character, Callum Mor, a gifted child, master mariner, derelict drunk, who eventually gains wisdom from a hard life's journey. He enters the dark zone of alcoholism and withdraws from society. With only his animals keeping him this side of sanity, he survives in a bleak solitude. Laced with grim humor, the novel has nature's harsh and beautiful rhapsody as the background for tragic human failings: violence, power, murder, rape, and madness. The failings are ultimately topped by the triumph of the human spirit. A family with a young girl seeks refuge from a storm at his house, and slowly, Callum Mor steps away from self-destruction to an astonishing awareness that triumphs over his tragedies. He saves the girl's life in a blizzard, and the glimmer of awakening dawns in him to set the stage for the final drama that illustrates the resilience of the human spirit. It reads like an extended prose poem reflecting the primal forces of nature and of human nature.