The Coals of Juniper

The Coals of Juniper is a baby boomer coming-of-age novel and probably no more needs to be said about its plot, essentially an absurdist love triangle involving Juniper, Hector, and Hector’s wife Matty.

It was written in the mid-1970s and published by a friend, the fabled Ted Hopkins, who at the time was reconstructing his life on top of a brief, but momentous football career. The Coals of Juniper was the first novel under his Champion Publications imprint, which subsequently produced much better books than Coals.

When I recently read it again, for the first time in decades, I knew I had to revise it. Even if it couldn’t be recovered as a work of art, re-writing it would allow me to relive some of the past, to experience a sort of second coming. In the end I found myself tinkering with the words – but not the integrity of the characters, whose innocence was in any case untouchable. Another mentor from that period, poet and literary critic Dorothy Auchterlonie, thought she detected in the original text ‘the existence of a value-system’, which I imagine is much the same thing as innocence. She also found ‘the promise of an economical style, with some astringent wit.’

Promises, promises…