Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

want to do good, he argues, but ‘they encounter all sorts of monsters that try to tempt them’
(Mitchell, 1996, Interview, 72). The real monster is not Griffiths, but it does find in Griffiths’
vehement criticism of American policy in Vietnam a vehicle for infiltrating Drummond’s
mind.
Another such vehicle for the infiltration of evil is the crow-like vagrant Luke Goddard,
who was also at Langford’s farm, living in a shack which smelled ‘like the den of an animal’
(HW, 52). He ‘had always been the carrier of some malicious intention’ (HW, 55), and
‘seemed not to be human, but instead to be a black spirit in the landscape, passing with bent
head’. Goddard is the first of the ‘Black Ghosts’ who Langford captures in his camera, and
also the first to disturb him in his sleep, when
in his dark jacket, he came into Mike’s dreams. He came through the window
of the sleepout and tugged at the counterpane, trying to draw Mike out into the
night of a hundred years ago. And now his stern face had changed: it was
young, noble and refined: a dark prince of the air. (HW, 52)
Goddard is Langford’s first evil tormentor. He follows Langford who is courting his
first love, Maureen Maguire, the farm-worker’s daughter, threatens to expose them to his
father, and finally rapes the girl, leading to her family’s disappearance and causing the
psychological turmoil which will eventually lead Langford into Asia. Goddard’s part in the
novel is limited, however, as he does not really belong to its period, but is somehow connected
with it through the distant past, associated perhaps with the Aboriginal sense of the Dreamtime
in opposition to the Western sense of history, and with the Indian theme of reincarnation within
the literary tradition of a good character being bedevilled through a series of lives by an evil
one. For Langford, Goddard remains an image of his memory, strongly connected with the
stinging nettles of the dusty gully on the farm: ‘Like stained and mildewed cloth, their smell
itself stained, the dark green weeds recalled something terrible: something in an ancient life
that had to be paid for’ (HW, 51). Goddard, the crows and trishaws are not so much evil in
themselves as they are heralds of the turn of the wheel of time, recalling the failings of men to
perform their duties to preserve the scheme of dharma, and announcing the coming age of
adharma, when they shall scavenge the remains of evil’s destruction.
- 247 -