Reviews for Rebel for Good

The average rating for Rebel for Good based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-22 00:00:00 Laurence Lindeman Wikipedia hits the nail on the head for this novel by Trevor: �The characters in Trevor's work are typically marginalized members of society: children, the elderly, single middle-aged men and women, or the unhappily married. Those who cannot accept the reality of their lives create their own alternative worlds into which they retreat. A number of the stories use Gothic elements to explore the nature of evil and its connection to madness.� The main character is a 47-year old widow in a small English town who is marrying a much younger man, a good-looking bit-part actor who appears across England in a TV ad. Her young-adult daughters are happy for her but her mother has reservations that she (unfortunately) keeps to herself. The actor is the protagonist in the story. Let�s make a list. We�ll start off mildly and work our way up the scale: he�s a cad, a con-man, a gigolo, a sponge, a user, a bigamist, a sociopath and maybe a psychopath. He uses women for money. Sometimes he marries them, as he did with an elderly widow; sometimes he gets them pregnant, as he does with the third main character in the story, a young woman who has his now-12-year-old daughter. He flits in and out of their lives causing more damage. The actor seems to be multisexual. (Yes, that�s a word now.) He�ll go with old ladies and young women and he has sex with men for money. At one point in the story he�s attracted to an underage girl. He�s an equal-opportunity destroyer of lives. This is probably the most sexually-oriented novel of all of Trevor�s that I have read, but there is no joy in any of the sex. It all seems to be survival tactics on the actor�s part. The latest widow�s honeymoon in Italy (for which she paid) ends disastrously and she never sees him again. Yet she still loves him and through various twists and turns, gets involved in the other people in his life. (Back to the title.) She watches the tragic downward spiral of the mother of the actor�s child; she even gets involved with his parents in an old folks� home. It�s been said that it�s easy for us to see the flaws in other people�s lives but not in our own. We want to take a few friends and family members and shake them by the shoulders and say: �Stop drinking!� �Leave that abusive loser!� �Get off your butt and get a decent job.� �Pay some attention to your kids!� �Lose some weight and two-thirds of your health problems will go away.� To the widow we want to say �Cut loose from these people! It�s over. Get on with your life.� But then we would have no story. There are other themes in the story. One is the widow�s overly-caring nature: ��her compassion made a victim of her.� As in many of Trevor�s works there�s a Catholic-Protestant theme. The widow is Catholic, so the con-artist studies up on the religion to pretend he�s Catholic. Meanwhile the local priest is in love with her. With all this trauma, the widow start losing her faith. She tells the priest her feelings now about God: �Is He my own particular illusion, a fog of comfort to be lost in? �.He�s just a wisp of nothing now.� I really enjoy Trevor�s work; this one, Other People�s Worlds is my tenth novel by him and I�ve also read a couple of collections of his short stories. A very good story. Photo of Congleton, Cheshire from alamy.com The author from theaustralian.com.au

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-14 00:00:00 Kathleen Driscoll I hadn't quite thought of it this way. Yes, we're connected; we abut; we do dialogue; we do the essentials in conjunction: procreation, tennis volleys, sarcasm. Yet, in real life, we are not actors in a stage play; this is not a set piece. Each of us has, first, our own existence, our own understanding, our own world. Yours is not mine; nor mine, yours. But by necessity, we occasionally enter each other's world. And there is not always a suitable translation. Julia Ferndale is widowed, a Catholic, with two grown daughters and living with her mother in slightly reduced circumstances. She types legal documents for the law offices of Warboys, Smith and Toogood, Solicitors and Commissioners of Oaths. Doris Smith lives with her daughter, a love child, and hides her half-bottles of vodka in a bread box. She sells shoes, but not after her petty thievery is discovered. Francis Tyte looks like Leslie Howard and has done commercials, small parts in television. He ingratiates, charms. He leaves when he has what he wants. It is Francis who fathered Doris' child. It is Francis who will marry, then desert Julia. Connections suddenly were everywhere, an ugly sense crept out of hiding. This is classic Trevor, with an attention to detail (sponge-bag trousers and a jacket gone over with thawpit), wry colloquialism (He'd got even thinner, his face especially, not that it didn't suit him. Lean bacon's best, as Irene in handbags always said.), and a seeping creepiness. Police are called; Miss Purchase runs a nursing home; Julia's mother hobbles to her bench under the tulip tree. They, too, have their own worlds, and see it all through a separate lens.