Mary – a bright but slightly frivolous teenager – is wooed by sweet-sounding sirens; the lure of sexual psychopathy with its compulsive quicksands, the trendy student philanthropies, the fake Edens of the devious egalitarian social worker.
Her courage and strength of character are the antidote and the solution to these charlatans and other false flags. They enable her to avoid what Kierkegaard calls, ‘The greatest despair of not knowing who you are.’
She evolves into a sound-minded young woman, who also by her love for a poor and lonely fellow student, not only saves him but also deepens her own spirit.
Peter Morris, the author of a number of novels and a retired anaesthetist, has lived and worked in Britain, Scandinavia and Europe.
Here he writes in the first person, boldly penetrating – he hopes – the labyrinth of the female psyche in its late teens, as his heroine – a modern-day university student – struggles with the deceptions and dualities of persona on offer and is tempted by that attitude of quasi-jurisdiction over others which is so in-vogue.
His real objective though, is not to unpick any feminine impulse, but to emphasise the absolute necessity of finding your true self; as Shakespeare says in Hamlet, ‘To thine own self be true,’ or as the Delphic Oracle would have it, ‘Know thyself.’