Samuel Wedge
Memoir of Necropolis
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Samuel Wedge: Memoir of Necropolis “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." – F. Scott Fitzgerald On The Thin Edge of Honor and Destruction (A review by Elizabeth Richeson) Kevin Annett’s new novel, Samuel Wedge (AuthorHouse, Bloomington, Indiana, $19.95) is a gradually evolving chronicle of evil told by an old man, trying but failing to escape from a terrible secret. More sober than Joyce Cary’s larcenous but charming Gulley Jimson, but devastated less by the honor of struggle than Hemingway’s Old Man, Santiago, Wedge vacillates between his Florida sanctuary and his former Davidian confrontation, his combat avec ses defenseurs, with overpowering adversaries as a former young pastor in a remote logging town on Vancouver Island. In his former bucolic life, he discovers and reveals the terrible history of Canada’s religious colonialism and thinly masked murder. In return he is pilloried, ostracized and marginalized by church and state, enduring an ideological struggle in which he persists for more than 20 years. Ultimately, sadder, wiser, but not totally bereft of hubris, he is left to confront his own private leviathan in Florida’s elephantine graveyard. But just as Wedge’s isolated horror story expands and becomes a sickening metaphor for universal evil imbedded in the seats of the mighty, for the American reader, the comfortable contemplation of an Erehwon world to the North whose deadly simplicity gradually evokes the understanding that ubiquitous evil walks among us all. In the councils of church and state, and beyond – in the very boardrooms, the editorial offices and the judicial chambers of those who lever today’s world – Wedge discovers that there is murderous injustice in the form of tiny crucifixions that routinely occur, never talked about, much less mentioned, in our carefully manicured society and our narrowly censored media. And the thin edge of lonely heroism is all that can save us from destruction. Like Santiago more than Gulley Jimson, Samuel Wedge – as simply as a little child – may serve to lead us.
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About the Book
Like Salman Rushdie’s “Joseph Anton,” Kevin Annett’s novel, through the scope and freedom of fiction, allows him to describe the trials of a man who seeks to oppose and bring to justice people in high places who are protected by the government, the justice system, and the popular media. The action ranges from Vancouver Island to Central Florida and spans some thirty years of the protagonist’s life. It is a human tragedy written with humor and compassion.
It is strictly for a mature and serious readership of all ages.
About the Author
Reverend Kevin D. Annett, BA, MA, MDiv, has lectured widely in Europe and America and has been a community worker, ordained minister, writer, filmmaker, and broadcaster. In 1992, as pastor in Port Alberni, British Columbia, he discovered a history of atrocity suggesting genocide in his church’s residential school that had taken place for more than a century. Such had been the case in 140 such “schools” across Canada, which have been run by the major churches. Refusing to remain silent, he was discharged by his church and defrocked. For more than twenty years, he has advocated and worked internationally toward justice for indigenous people, children and other victims of Church and State. In 2015, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize.
Samuel Wedge is an autobiographical novel based on his story.
Kevin Annett has produced and directed Unrepentant, an internationally award-winning feature-length film and has produced three nonfiction books, one of which, Love and Death in the Valley, was published by AuthorHouse in 2002 and is still selling twelve years later. He is a co-founder of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (www.itccs.org) and common law courts of justice in many countries.