Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This novel tracks three New Yorkers who travel to Morocco. As they journey into the desert interior, cultural and moral dissonance are played out against a harsh, and increasingly more menacing, terrain. Tragedy and a sinister desert journey dominate the second half of the book, with both redemption and madness found in the dunes.
Tell me about The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles.
This is a novel about the parallel universe that opens up when you step out of urban civility into wild terrain. It centres on an American couple travelling to Morocco and opens with the crazy markets and tearooms, the hubble-bubble smoking in the towns, which are a vivid, almost frightening glimpse of another world. The travellers are enthusiastic but their ignorance makes them vulnerable; they have no way of being usefully watchful in this alien terrain. As they journey south the heat and disorientation intensifies and the towns grow further and further apart, with wilderness sucking them into a chain of events they cannot control. As everything disintegrates around them we see the truth behind the veneer of civility. In the emptiness they are faced with themselves and, as the marriage dissolves, the danger of travel becomes a nightmare – beyond the harsh terrain, disease and physical toll of desert travel, tragedy and madness wait.
In a way, all desert books are about travelling within yourself, and not being entirely in control. That surrender to the kindness of strangers is common to everything I’ve ever read about the desert, too. You surrender everything because the desert will take it from you anyway. And you have to learn a new kind of watchfulness.
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Jo Tatchell is the author of A Diamond in the Desert, an illuminating portrait that gets behind the scenes in Abu Dhabi, the world’s richest city. Her first book, Nabeel’s Song: A Family Story of Survival in Iraq, was published by Sceptre in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. She writes on Middle Eastern culture and music for UK and US media.
