A few readers of our site seem to ‘disapprove’: they feel that we are being unfair, and unkind to poor Jim Perrin… and as they are unable to respond to us directly they have posted their comments on other sites. This particular group — the majority of whom we believe to be Jim Perrin in ‘chameleon’ guise ref. A question of identity? — can have no knowledge of our sister’s life and, as ‘the dead have no right of reply’, we are as resolved as ever to correct whenever possible all the untruthful things Jim Perrin has written about his short relationship with her.
Recently some points were made on Amazon which we do choose to respond to, but before we do we would like to say that the comment to which we now refer is, in our opinion, another one ‘placed’ or ‘influenced’ by Jim Perrin. ‘Not so’ he might reply, ref. The Guardian thread and comments — ‘Melangell’, 02/08/2010, but this is our reasoning:
Two comments were posted in quick succession by Rob MacNeacail, on 15/10/2010. Both were very short and innocuous, of five and two lines respectively. The second was an apology to us, for the first. These were deleted: a third was then posted which stayed up, and given the brevity of the first two, was an extraordinary fifty two lines long…
It begins: ‘Just to be clear here [this sounds very like a dogmatic Jim Perrin pronouncement] I’m not Jim’. He explains a family connection; he is the son of Aonghas MacNeacail who wrote a ‘review’ of Jim Perrin’s work. But we believe that the rest of the comment is mainly, if not all, a ‘Jim Perrin Production’. If we are wrong we do of course apologise unreservedly to Rob MacNeacail. Other readers may agree with us; or not. But the style of this comment — so similar in construction and phrasing and its content and length — does, we feel, disclose the ‘fingerprints’ of Jim Perrin, down to the ‘thank heavens’ at the end. (Ref. ‘Melangell‘s’ comment at The Guardian, 03/08/2010.)
It is not our intention ‘to defend your [our] sister’s memory’ (deleted first comment) rather, we are attempting to show, and to prove, that it is Jim Perrin‘s ‘memory’ which is so frequently false. The point about the ‘marriage’ is wilfully, skilfully, side-stepped: however, Jim Perrin knows as well as we do that Jac had no intention of marrying him. He wrote to her on the subject and she, with very good reason, refused him many times, right up to her death. Therefore for him to claim that they were actually married — in articles, in interviews both written and in person — after her death is flagrant dishonesty. He knows that she had positively refused him.
We are not expressing ‘classic anger at the loss of a loved one’ (psychology?). But we are certainly very angry at what we believe to be Jim Perrin’s deliberate falsehoods. And, ‘he’ goes on to write, ‘You appear to have decided to take your anger [sic] on the person who took Jac away from you’. (More psychology!) — and which of course he, Jim Perrin, despite his best efforts, singularly failed to do. No: Our anger is quite specific. We wish to refute, whenever possible, what we know to be the lies in his astonishing and self-serving account — so heart-rendingly written in West.
‘Such matters should be kept private.’ (echoes of ‘Melangell’s’ comments, as above.) Which ‘matters’ we might ask ourselves? Our response perhaps to Jim Perrin’s wicked lie that he was at our sister’s bed-side when she died? We find it impossible to reconcile our knowledge of the truth with his lies — his manifest lies…
There is no ‘feud’. We are just carrying on with our self-appointed task until we reach a natural conclusion. We have made clear what our intentions are and why we are doing it. Jim Perrin, discomfited perhaps by our continuing posts, has endeavoured at every turn and by every means to discredit us. And as for the remark ‘that the public don’t need to hear about it’ — such disrespect for his readers; such arrogance that they should be expected to take his book as an honest account and have no regard for the truth as expressed by Jac’s sisters. How extraordinarily patronising: although we perfectly understand that he would prefer those readers not to know the truth…
As to the ‘poor taste’ of which Rob MacNeacail (JP?) accuses us — throughout the last few weeks Jim Perrin, with his well-honed skill, has tried to plant in the reader’s minds unworthy thoughts about us — actually resorting to downright lies to do so. Yet parts of his book are in exceptionally ‘poor taste’: salacious, lewd and gratuitously sexual — not just about our own sister but also about other women by whom he has been slighted (in this book about his ‘deep grief and loss’… ) and of whom he writes with disparagement and a marked disdain. Yes, ‘he’s a writer, and writers will write’ but should this give him carte blanche to write so distastefully and to be so exploitative?
And we are not really surprised by Rob MacNeacail’s (JP?) closing paragraph that ‘…it would be equivalent for him [Jim Perrin] to have documented his side, in full, in his book…’ Such a coincidence that ‘Melangell'(JP?) should have written on that Guardian thread 02/08/2010 ‘There is a great deal more I could say, and in publishable language.’ This is clearly a threat — ‘A great deal more’; ‘publishable language’! Well, to a marked degree, Jim Perrin had already done so, and in the most outrageously imagined and malevolent detail (ref. p.6 of West for one really vile example!). But, we are very much alive and Jim Perrin should know better, one hopes, than to do any such thing; with what could only be his ‘pretence’ of the truth our lawyer tells us he would be on very shaky ground indeed…
Jac’s sisters.
NB. This post was written when the comment by Rob MacNeacail could still be read on Amazon. It is very interesting to find that it has now been deleted — all fifty-two lines of it, that and the two very short ones which preceded it — which begs the question ‘why and by whom?’ Of course we realise that the author (Jim Perrin) removed it after he read the post above, possibly aware, as we were, that it was incriminating; and the lack of it now for reference will leave our readers mystified. We do however ‘have a print-out’ and we will post it below in due course.
