title: The Acolyte (novel)
text: # The Acolyte (novel)
  
  The Acolyte is a Miles Franklin Award-winning novel by Australian author Thea Astley first published in 1972.
  
  ## Plot summary
  
  The novel is told in the first person by “the acolyte,” Paul Vesper. The novel traces the career of a fictional Australian musician and composer named Jack Holberg. Beginning in obscurity as a piano player in Grogbusters, a dreary little Queensland town, the blind Holberg eventually gains international recognition as a composer. Vesper, who had met Holberg during his less renowned period, gives up an engineering career to serve the great man—in a sense, to become his eyes.
  
  