The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor is ranked only 17120th on the Greatest Books of All Time, and I see three possibilities here: 1. Nobody should bother with my notes, because this is one of my Top 200, or 500 at the very least 2. That GOAT algorithm is nonsense 3. The answer is given by Aristotle’s golden mean, which ‘is the ethical principle that virtue lies at the balanced midpoint between two extremes: excess and deficiency’, in other words, this should be placed at 500, and I am obviously jesting here…you find thousands of reviews on magnum opera from The GOAT site, even the bottom of the list apparently, on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel
The Children
of Dynmouth by William Trevor is ranked only 17120th on the Greatest
Books of All Time, and I see three possibilities here: 1. Nobody should bother
with my notes, because this is one of my Top 200, or 500 at the very least 2.
That GOAT algorithm is nonsense 3. The
answer is given by Aristotle’s golden mean, which ‘is the ethical principle
that virtue lies at the balanced midpoint between two extremes: excess and
deficiency’, in other words, this should be placed at 500, and I am obviously
jesting here…you find thousands of reviews on magnum opera from The GOAT site,
even the bottom of the list apparently, on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel
10 out of 10
I had been enchanted
by three novels by Willaim Trevor https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/mesmerized-by-reading-turgenev-by.html already, before coming to The
Children of Dynmouth with some mixed feelings: on the one hand the author is
glorious, but on the other:
It seemed
that the subject, the narrative might be challenging to the point where I
reject it, even worse, reading some introduction I was under the impression
that this will be a ‘real horror show’, to quote from The Clockwork Orange https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/11/a-clockwork-orange-by-anthony-burgess.html
Timothy Gedge would be the equivalent of Alex from the superb
chef d’oeuvre by Anthony Burgess, although we could look at the White House,
what is left of it, and see an Orange Psycho that resembles Gedge – an
anti-hero, except the one from The Children of Dynmouth is much more likeable than
the orange man baby
After the trouble with placing the novel in its proper place,
The GOAT says 17120, I say more like 120, there is the self-analysis prompted
by Timothy and the book in general, because even if I could not say that I
would like the boy to be let us say a son of mine, still, I do not find him all
that abominable, there would be reasons for that:
He is not as vicious as The Butcher Boy https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-butcher-boy-by-patrick-mccabe-96.html and furthermore, I was led to believe
that he will do terrible things, by the buildup, as I mistakenly saw it, but
more by what I have read (presumably, between the lines) in the introduction or
somewhere
Yes, the act that Timothy wants to put on stage is rather
horrible, three women had been killed, and he wants to make fun at their
demise, somehow, and then he blackmails people in Dynmouth, even children, to
get props he wants for this amateur competition, notwithstanding that, some
things are true, maybe most of them
One married commander is a homosexual who seems to be
inclined towards pedophilia, and that is surely serious, although I am not sure
if he keeps this under control or it had passed the threshold of committing a
crime, his wife had had no sex for all these decades, thinking this is the way
it should be, unaware of her spouse’s orientation
The serious, terrible thing that the antihero commits affects
the children, Stephen and Kate (if that was her name, I am not sure) Timothy
tells them that Stephen’s father has killed his mother (Stephen’s) so that he
could marry Kate’s parent, even if it is a lie, technically, there is something
in all that…I think the novel is outstanding
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