Turning Back The Sun
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“A moving lament for a vanished world and for the difficulties of human communication…a rewarding read.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Intelligent and lyrical in its evocation of life on the fringe of civilization.” (Library Journal)
Far away from the city of his birth, in a frontier town on the edge of tribal wilderness, a doctor tries to resolve the seemingly unreconcilable demands of his public career and his personal feelings. He believes his exile her to be temporary, and youthful memories of the distant city torment him with an unbearable sense of loss. Yet he has grown to love a fellow exile, a woman of fierce independence and strong will, who belongs by nature to the warmth and chaos of the frontier. But, during a summer of drought and disease, the desert erupts into savagery and he is at last confronted by the choice of returning to the city or of remaining with her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thubron is a British travel writer ( Where Nights Are Longest ) and novelist ( A Cruel Madness ) whose sense of atmosphere and character may remind the reader of Graham Greene, without seeming at all derivative. This novel has a rather portentous allegorical framework: in an unnamed country, presumably somewhere in Africa, hero Rayner (no first name) is a doctor struggling with a mysterious disease in a provincial town set in a wilderness inhabited by primitive bush people. He dreams nostalgically of the langorous, more cultivated coastal capital city where he grew up. After murders of townspeople by the savages, racial hatred begins to fester. Rayner, fascinated by the savages, becomes increasingly involved in their lives of apparent exile from an imagined paradise, and when he has a longed-for opportunity to return to the capital from which he was once exiled, he refuses to take it. Though the framework is heavy, Thubron's writing has remarkable vigor and fluency; and in Rayner's relationships--with the dancer Zoe, and with Ivar, a childhood friend who is now a rather sinister army officer--he shows sharp psychological insight and creates considerable pathos. In the end the book becomes a moving lament for a vanished world and for the difficulties of human communication. It's by no means a casual read, but an ultimately rewarding one.
