A Great Deliverance
43 pages • 1-hour read
Elizabeth GeorgeA Great Deliverance
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Symbols & Motifs
Content warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of graphic violence, illness, mental illness, substance use, child abuse, and death.
The Shrines
The shrines to absent family members in the novel are symbols of grief, but also of emotional manipulation. When Havers first sees the shrine to Tessa in the Teys household, she steps back “as if to ward off a blow” (100). This is not just because of the pain and grief the shrine represents, but the public performance of grief it entails. As Havers later confesses to Lynley, the shrine she built to honor her deceased brother, Tony, has a hidden agenda: to evoke guilt in her parents. Havers blames her parents for ignoring Tony during his final days. The shrine was supposed to force them to confront Tony’s absence; instead, it has caused them to retreat into a false reality.
Tessa’s shrine was built by William as part of a pattern of his emotional manipulation and abuse. Like the shrine to Tony, it was not built to memorialize the dead but to pressure the living. The shrine helped William emotionally blackmail Roberta and further control her. It also helped William win the sympathy of his community and paint himself as a grieving husband. Whereas Havers wanted a positive, if painful, outcome from her shrine, Williams only builds his shrine to promote harm.
Books
A Great Deliverance presents books as a form of escapism. The presence of books in the Teys family home, for example, is noted by a number of characters in the community. Both Gilian and later Roberta are noted for their love of novels and reading in general, though they read the novels in very different ways. Since both girls are suffering from years of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, the novels offer a way to escape to a different world, in which the protagonists are rewarded and the antagonists are punished. For Gillian and Roberta, the idea of such justice being delivered against their villainous father seems impossible. As a result, they escape into their books as a way of dealing with the emotional trauma of their present.
Tellingly, the girls’ love of reading leads the community to simply decide that they are bookish and withdrawn. The community ignores the reality of their abuse by attributing their bookishness and their need for escapism to their social awkwardness rather than a sign of something deeper. Even when Roberta tells her teacher, Miss Fitzalan, about the abuse, her teacher “didn’t do anything […]. She didn’t help” (288). Books, in this respect, symbolize the extent to which these young girls have been let down by their community.
The Church
The small Catholic church in Keldale is a symbol of faith, but it is also a symbol of the community’s willful ignorance. As Father Hart explains, the church symbolizes enduring faith in times of great upheaval. It has defied external pressure and survived for many centuries. Father Hart sees himself as a custodian of this tradition, which is one of the reasons he is unwilling to break the sanctity of the confessional to report William’s actions.
The interior of the church alludes to the way in which the community is unable to address the truth. Hart points out the carvings above the confessional booth, and Lynley and Havers are surprised to see depictions of nudity in a spiritual place. The townspeople are unaware of these carvings though they exist in the open. As such, the carvings foreshadow the community’s willingness to overlook the violence and abuse carried out by William Teys.
The baby left by William in the church’s ruined abbey died and was buried in the church graveyard by Father Hart. The death of the baby is a tragic realization of how the violence of the past continues into the present. The death of the baby is hushed up; no one is willing to investigate what really happened. Instead, Hart engraves the baby’s gravestone with a epigraph that hints at what might have really happened. The grave of the baby becomes a symbolic condemnation of the moral cowardice of the community. They are represented by Father Hart, who enlists the police to investigate the case he cannot bring himself to reveal.
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