Read it in Books:The Sheltering Sky.

"From a certain point onward, there is no turning back; that is the point that must be reached" - Franz Kafka.

"Each man's destiny is personal only insofar as it may happen to resemble what is already in his memory" - Eduardo Mallea.

"Alienation and existential despair" - now, they're themes I can get down with. When my friend Dan gave me as a gift a copy of Paul Bowles' 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky I must admit I had no clue what it was about. I was vaguely aware of a 1990 film (directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich) but I'd not even seen that. I put the book on my shelf and pretty much forgot all about it.

I didn't even really expect to read it but over the next couple of years I caught it winking at me and, finally, in July of this year I grabbed hold of it and gave it a good seeing to. For the most part I was glad I did because it was interesting and, occasionally enriching, if not always totally gripping.

The author, Paul Bowles, is actually better known as a composer. He studied under Aaron Copland and went on to receive considerable acclaim for his Ravel inspired piano improvisations as well as becoming an ethnomusicologial pioneer, specifically in North Africa. Which is where, in his late thirties, he had the idea for the story of The Sheltering Sky. It took him a year, mostly in Tangier and Fez, to complete what became his first major novel, and soon he was the toast of the literary world. Receiving praise from the likes of Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess, and William Burroughs.

The basic gist of the story is that married couple Kit and Port Moresby have drifted apart, intimacy between them has ceased, and they've relocated to Algeria to see if the desert heat can put the heat back into their marriage. As you might expect, things don't work out quite like that.

In fact things go massively tits up. Port has his passport stolen and feels obliged to drink cognac with a lieutenant, Kit takes to necking French whisky neat, they take it in turns to be ill, and at times it's so breathlessly hot that the Americans start to feel like insects under magnifying glasses.  They both question the very definition of their own and each other's existence, their place on Earth, and their failing frames. People cheat on each other, people steal from each other, and people punch each other.

The spiral just intensifies. They're forever moving from one place to another (places with evocative names like Ain Krorfa, Bou Noura, El Ga'a, and Sba) and yet this just seems to multiply their woes and maladies. At one point Kit imagines Port has meningitis. Or is it malaria? Typhus? Typhoid? Diptheria? Yellow fever? Kala azar whatever that is)? Or just the plain old plague? He's certainly sick, but then so is she and the sense of being aliens in a land they barely understand does not help with either of their convalescences.

Their story, their unravelling if you like, is set against a backdrop of Arabs in fezzes drinking mineral water, shoeshine boys with their faces covered in flies, trams dinging their bells, idly plucked ouds, and waiters proffering declasse pastis. The emotional backdrop, too, is fiercely drawn. Port suffers a cultural cringe as he walks around town. People stare at him, talk about him in a language he can't understand, and he feels guilt at being well fed and healthy in a region where so few are. He wonders if "any American can truthfully accept a definition of life which makes it synonymous with suffering".

The language is often one of negativity and despair. Colours are "indifferent", designs are "apathetic", landscapes are unreachable, Kit's pain "unendurable and endless", dark dreams are shattered, and "the light of terror" is constant . Certain phrases conjure universes in their imagery. "There was a certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness", Port's "being was a well a thousand miles deep". They stop you in your tracks and when Port compares life to smoking a cigarette it's hard not to become overwhelmed by sadness:-

"The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realise it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste".

Ouch! The essence of the story is not, however - or at least not entirely, a treatise on mortality but instead an incisive, yet abstracted, deconstruction of both a marriage in trouble and the personality traits of both Port and Kit that allow themselves to let this happen. Port appears dogmatic and reticent to admit any fault on his own behalf, a holier-than-thou type who insists he's a traveller rather than a tourist and even has a theory to back that up.

He imagines himself the protagonist of the story and Kit a mere spectator, or accessory, to his life. Denied her own narrative. He's not so much cruel as he is neglectful. His own concept of living a free, romantic life means he's barely able to entertain other people who may feel differently. His great passion is not for Kit, it's not for other people at all but for "solitude and the proximity of infinite things". He has shut himself in a cage to protect himself him from love and hurt, yet he wants for Kit to share in his almost abstracted passions. Alas, she does not.

 

Kit, who some days "could feel doom hanging over her head like a low raincloud", struggles with the knowledge of impending, yet suspended, personal disaster. She plays out past scenarios in her mind again and again even though she can't change them. She relies on a self-constructed system of omens, dream interpretations, and superstitions to guide her life and these, of course, only serve to consign her to further unhappiness.

She's barely able to relate to other people, empathise with them, or even dislike them. She can only view them as signifiers or influencers in her own existence so when she claims  "other people rule my life" she doesn't mean it in an altruistic way. She struggles to accept she cares about what Port does but still loses sleep agonising over everything. Even when Kit feeels happy she is aware that she is on a pendulum and in an hour's time it will swing her back towards despair. I found myself identifying with her more than I did Port. 

Even if I've never, quite, woken up with a hangover and necked an entire bottle of champagne before getting out of bed. Her relationship with Tunner, the seeming third wheel in this adventure, is one she views completely through the prism of her prior relationship with Port. Tunner bores her and she finds him "offensively chipper". She tells herself he's a "dolt" because "his emotional manouevres all take place out in the open. Not a tree or rock to hide behind". She even gets annoyed when his eyes sparkle! This distaste doesn't appear to register with Port who is suspicious of Kit and Tunner's one-way friendship.

 

What are Tunner's motivations for joining them on a trip in which he's seemingly unwanted? He's described, memorably, as "an essentially simple individual irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp" and it's suggested that he's normally, and effortlessly, very popular with everyone he meets so trying to ingratiate himself with ingrates may, subsconsciously, be "giving his personality the exercise it required".

The local Arabic population aren't treated particularly well by Port, Kit, or Tunner, dismissed, at one point, as "monkeys". But does Bowles treat them any better? Are their characters fleshed out as well as our three leading protagonists or even as well as the deserts, hotels, and souks? It sometimes feels as if the camels, the strong black coffee, and the "draped indigo veils" are there to give flavour rather than texture and it has to be said that none of the African characters are given the depth of character that Bowles has provided for Port and Kit.

 

That can be justified, just, by contesting that this story is about Port and Kit, it's about strangers in a strange land, and their very real inability to understand the behaviour or the motivations of those who have actually grown up there. While The Sheltering Sky whispers uncomfortable truths about colonial hangovers it also speaks softly, yet powerfully, about man's attitude to women. Often Kit is treated as mere property. By Port, by Tunner, and by the local Arabs. For most of the book her story is played out as an interior monologue. Her most meaningful conversations are the ones she has with herself in her own head because her male companions have not bestowed her with sufficient agency to view her as an equal.

Whether that was Bowles' intention, back in the forties, it's hard to say. It seems unlikely. But Bowles is an astute observer of human behaviour as evinced by some lovely observations and meditations about life and how we live it. Kit feels sad each day at sunset as it feels like the end of an epoch, as if something is dying. Port thinks most clearly on journeys and makes "decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary", and vermouth-cassis sipping Lieutenant a'Armagnac (a minor character) allows "himself the luxury of not being snobbish about the indigenous population".

It's a book in which large events take place but you barely notice them as you're forced to experience them through the worldview of people who, despite their undoubted intellect, don't fully understand what is happening to, and around, them. My attention did drift at times, the book was not without longueurs, and I rarely found myself particularly emotionally invested in the lives of Kit, Port, Tunner, or anybody else who cropped up but I still found it rewarding. I take away Bowles' meditations on life, ageing, the passing of time, and his frustration at just how difficult it is for people to make true and lasting connections with each other more than I accept the book as a page turner and certainly more than I'd accept it as a travel guide to Algeria and the Sahara. But then I doubt that was ever Paul Bowles' intention. Thanks to Dan for this and all the other books, jazz CDs, and Tunnock's tea cake mugs he's gifted me over the years.