And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. In between the many unlovable characters in the book, I found beautiful passages and wisdom that I could meditate upon life. Can I enjoy a book when it is beyond my frame of reference (cultural and otherwise)? Can I step back and ignore my frame of reference and appreciate the book as it is? This is the time when I ask myself how objective can I be when I’m reading a book. I am not sure if this treatment of the local subject is meant to create a sinister tone to what’s coming, but it made it appear as if the desert and its people are hostile and unforgiving, and if you don’t speak the language or watch your back you may get whipped and incarcerated! In fact the desert people or the Bedouin follows a very generous code of honour, no one refuses food or water from a desert traveller and it is in their duty to be hospitable.
The problem is that I know Morocco intimately and to have the book’s characters (or Bowles) spat on every food and people that they came across, left a bad taste in my mouth. The pages certainly atmospheric and tension was built throughout. This is one book that surprises me every way, partly due to the fact that I went into the book expecting it to be action and adventure packed, perhaps murder mystery in it another part is the final 100 pages that took a drastic turn in event and plunged Kit into an abyss dearth of human civilisation that I didn’t expect. Along the way, they met obnoxious mother and son Mrs and Eric Lyle, the locals and the authorities, like Belqassim. Port and Kit were not alone, a friend Tunner was travelling with them, whose presence only adds to the tangle and opaque relationship between Port and Kit. Kit fears the desert while Port is drawn to its beauty and remoteness. Port hopes the journey will reunite them, but although they share similar emotions, they are divided by their conflicting outlooks on life. Avoiding the chaos of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, they travel to the remote North African desert. “Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.” – page 5Īfter ten years of marriage, Kit and Port Moresby have drifted apart and are sexually estranged.
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