Please enjoy another quote from Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLaren. Jack Grundon is a teenage boy who becomes a pariah after attacking the Alawite rapist of his classmate Agatha:
His father: what did he have to say about his father? The man had secured a livelihood without maintaining a marriage; in any other historical context but the modern one, Jack wondered, would it have been conceivable that his life was something other than a failure, a shame? And now that shame had deepened because of Jack, his actions, and because John Grundon, his father, was no longer himself anymore but the one responsible for raising him: Mad Jack, the undesirable lunatic who had squandered, all in one go, his serious chance of getting into a good university and due to striking Basil, the reputation of his entire family. Even if all the accusations of his assault on Agatha were cleared up, that stain would linger. ‘Funny how everyone pretends that
honour doesn’t exist’, Jack thought to himself, ‘but as soon as you embarrass yourself in the wrong way—not by molesting a girl, but by acting against the one inconveniently responsible—suddenly it’s the Victorian Age again…’
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