I’m not ashamed to tell you that I worship at the temple. And I’m often in awe as I read what he has written. I’m talking about Peter Temple of course. There are tradesman writers and there are serious storytellers but very few amongst them are masters. Read a few sentences from a Temple novel and you know immediately that you are in the hands of a real master.
Here are just a few lines from “Truth” and all of them are thoughts or
insights of John Villani the police protagonist in the novel.
A shriek, a pure scarlet stab of pain.
“No pity left in him. When pity leaves you it’s time to go, you’ve stopped being fully human.”
“And he passed into a sleep of sad meaningless dreams.”
Looked up at a sky deep as heaven, pale as memory.
“A mouth too quick, always his failing.”
“The full stupidity of his life overwhelmed him and he closed his eyes.”
“He looked at nothing. The hardness, the air of bad things seen, the right to sit in judgement on lesser, weaker people.”
“Clever is sexy. Clever is all you need. Looks were a plus.”
“And he thought about what was undone, what was always beyond doing.” Big ragged holes in the clouds, a sky to eternity.
“And he began to weep. For a while, he wept in silence and then he began to sob, softly first then louder and louder. It came to him that he had never cried out loud in his life. It was as if he was singing for the first time.”
John A Wilson, November 2018
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