After finishing Mary Beard's SPQR for my men's book club and Barbara Pym's Jane and Prudence for a bit of diversion, something made me turn to Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, published in Britain in 1949, and later in the U.S. by New Directions, after Doubleday had rejected it and asked Bowles to return the advance they'd given him to write the book. It's one of those novels I've always known about, but for some reason I'd never gotten around to reading it, or anything else by Bowles. But he's also one of the mid-twentieth century writers I'm very interested in, so when I saw that J had loaded a copy on the Kindle account, I decided to take the plunge.
This book is definitely worth the effort, and there is a bit of effort involved. I can understand why editors at Doubleday might have been confused by it. There doesn't seem to be much of a plot at all, other than wandering rather aimlessly in the desert. Then (spoiler alert!) about halfway in the focal character, Port Moresby, falls ill, and his wife Kit becomes the center of the narrative. Their friend and traveling companion, Tunner, returns to the story episodically, but then seems to disappear into the background. Eventually, Kit herself seems to vanish as the novel follows her flight from reality, or is it her quest for identity; the reader is left to ponder the meaning, if there is one.
So how is this novel a classic and a candidate for the 100 best novels of the 20th century? That's a very good question. But after reading it, and falling under its spell, I tend to agree that it deserves the accolades it's received. For one thing, Bowles is a powerful writer, who can evoke the experience of traveling in a forbidding environment and exotic, alien culture. The reader is immersed in the day to day adventures and struggles, inconveniences and hardships such travel involves. It's northern Africa just after World War II, and the local infrastructure, what is left of it, has yet to recover from the destruction and chaos wrought by warfare. There are few hotels, but even those few are marginal; the food is strange and often unappealing; the means of transportation are limited to irregular train and bus service and hitching rides with other travelers or local delivery truck drivers. But there is also beauty and poetry in this strange environment, especially when seen through Port's eyes.
But perhaps the most affective part of the novel is also the most difficult to read, because the suffering is so raw and the outcome so obviously inevitable. Port's illness comes on slowly, but then progresses to something serious while he and Kit are on an interminable bus ride into the interior of Saharan Africa. As Kit realizes that Port is not only very ill, but might die, her reactions are wrenchingly believable and realistic. Bowles presents the confrontation with mortality and the finality of death by his characters in a way that brings the starkness of existence into sharp focus. I have to admit I felt a chill deep in my core as I read those chapters confronting the finiteness and finality of human existence.
I knew that after the death of Port, the novel's focus would shift to Kit and her attempts to cope with her new life, once she was completely on her own and without Port's assistance or guidance. Her efforts become increasingly bizarre, and her flight seems to be away from everything familiar. Is it life she is experiencing or another kind of death or denial of existence of her former self? I'm not sure what I think about this part of the book, but it does make one think. For now it has also made me want to read just a bit more of Bowles's work before forming a more settled opinion. So I'm off on my own immersion in Bowles and his African stories. Fortunately, I've got all of it in my Library of America edition.
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