Barbara Samuel’s introduction to Green Darkness is what inspired me to start this project. She wrote about keeping a reading journal, and that appealed to me. It’s a wonder the thought never crossed my mind before. But now that I’m out of school and have a lot of extra free time on my hands (and thus feel much less guilty spending most of my free time reading than I did when I chose reading for fun over reading for class), I have plenty of time to read and start a new personal project. Lately, I’ve been reporting on really good books that I read prior to Christmas. I started Green Darkness right before Christmas and finished it maybe a week after. After this entry, I will be starting on the 34 books I received for Christmas from my family. I’ve made it through three and a half in the last three weeks, so I’m making good progress. I am trying to get them posted on here rather quickly so I can catch up, and write when thoughts pop into my mind rather than trying to remember them later.
Basically, Green Darkness is centered around the author’s belief in reincarnation. Celia, the main character, suffers from a clouded marriage. The air surrounding her and her husband Richard feels heavy, and when she moves into his estate in England, both start experiencing odd flashes and identity confusion. After a horrific rape scene, Celia sinks into a deep coma, in which the doctors don’t think she will survive. Her mother’s love interest, a man from India, believes that Celia and Richard’s past lives are haunting them and must be resolved, so he leads a comatose Celia through the past. And thus, we are taken back to Tudor England and experience the tension that was felt in those tumultuous years when first Edward V, Mary, and Elizabeth I ruled. Celia retains her name and is an orphaned girl working in a tavern, where she meets a long-lost relation (the past incarnation of her mother), who takes her to live at the estate (Cowdray) where she lives disgraced among Sir Anthony Brown and his family. There, Celia meets and falls in love with the house monk, Stephen (the past reincarnation of Richard). Their forbidden love comes to nothing for many years due to attempts by those around them to separate them. Celia is married off once and when widowed, engaged for a second time. She runs away rather than enter into said second marriage. At one point earlier in the book, during her first marriage, Celia goes to a witch to acquire a potion to help her get pregnant. Instead of using it on her first husband, she eventually uses it to seduce Stephen and as a result she becomes pregnant. At the end of her journey into her past life, prying eyes catch Stephen & Celia in the act of intercourse and Celia is captured and buried alive inside the walls of Ightham Mote. When she awakes from her coma, Celia is magically pregnant and also magically (and much to my annoyance) has no memory whatsoever of the rape. She goes back to Cowdray to fix things with Richard, who also remembers their past lives, and they take advantage of the second chance given to them.
The idea of reincarnation in this book really fascinates me. The idea that a small group of people are reincarnated together time after time through history until their troubles are resolved is an interesting one. It is frightening as well to think that life could actually work that way, that the bad people I’ve dealt with in my life and have tried to move past, could haunt any future lives I may or may not have. I am not a very religious person, so I’ve always been open to different spiritual ideas from all over the world. Reincarnation has always fascinated me, and Green Darkness most definitely fed this fascination for me.
