In 2021, a financial newspaper estimated the American televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s wealth to be in the region of $750 million. This fortune has helped the preacher build a property empire and purchase a fleet of private jets – acquisitions, he says, ordained by God.
Gillis, the principal character in Chris Kohler’s Phantom Limb, has not been quite so blessed. After suffering a knee injury in his twenties that derailed a promising athletics career in England, Gillis gave his life to the cloth. His decision to become a minister, however, came not from any love of God (in fact, Gillis isn’t even a believer), but because it promised to provide a life of relative comfort, complete with a place to live, a modest income and plenty of free time.
Now back in a small town in his native Scotland, he conducts two or three funerals a week, reciting the same passages from the Bible at each (the only ones he knows), while spending the rest of his time doing as little as possible. Most of his days are passed pining over his ex-girlfriend Rachel, who is grieving the recent death of her husband.
Until, that is, Gillis makes a remarkable discovery. In a hole left by the removal of an elm tree in the grounds of his church lies an animated disembodied hand. The hand possesses mystical healing properties, which are accidentally discovered by Nichols, a wealthy industrialist and the town’s majority landholder, a man as brusque as he is unscrupulous.
Nichols senses an opportunity for profit and pressures Gillis into lending him the hand. While the former dreams of expanding his business into an international empire, Gillis imagines a future as a modern-day prophet, the miraculous hand drawing crowds of admirers and propelling him (and a thoroughly impressed Rachel) into the corridors of power: a pit stop en route to paradise.
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