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The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Penguin Classics
0141181915
£7.99
Mr Tench went to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench's heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering fingernails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn't find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side. Mr Tench went on across the plaza.
This, as you'll probably have worked out, is not the opening paragraph of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky.
It's from Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory – which I think is comparable in lots of ways. For example, it's another going-to-the-end-of-the-world-and-dropping-off novel (a speciality of Greene's). But what I'm interested in right now is a different similarity, that between the prose and the place.
When I first began reading The Power and the Glory, probably fifteen years ago, I objected to what I saw as Greene's shabby writing. It may seem pernickety (it probably was) but I was offended by his punctuation. Those colons, three in a single paragraph, were ugly, obstructive. (Arguably, the writing would be more conventionally correct were they replaced by semi-colons.) They felt as though they were staples holding together a piece of worn-out fabric, where stitches should have been used.
And then, a while further into the book, I realised that this was exactly how the prose should read. Greene's Mexico is a fall-apart place. Classical, balanced prose would be inappropriate to this lopsided, crumbling, heat-battered locale.
Similarly with The Sheltering Sky:
He awoke, opened his eyes. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar. He needed no further consolation. In utter comfort, utter relaxation he lay absolutely still for a while, and then sank into one of the light momentary sleeps that occur after a long, profound one.
Paul Bowles' novel is about desiccation. What it starts with is defiantly inward, existential. No physical description of this 'he'. You're inside his head, whether you like it or not. How many contemporary novelists would risk 'non-being', 'infinite' and 'consciousness' in the first paragraph? And from here, it moves inexorably towards the desert – the place where sodden Western souls attempt to dry themselves out.
Dryness isn't mentioned, heat is implicit, throughout the paragraph. Just before the novel starts, Port Moresby and his wife, Kit, are taking a siesta. They have arrived the day before in North Africa. In company with them is another man, Tunner, whom they both seem to dislike. We only learn about the truth of their relations as they do, and that is gradually, with many things lost on the way.
Bowles' style is dry. Sentences follow one another, senses kept separate, rather than flowing through. He never allows his vowel sounds to become sumptuous or even a source of readerly pleasure. If they have music, it is that of decrepitation, drier even than cicadas. There is starchy quality to the fabric of his paragraphs, the remainder or reminder of a non-novelistic formality: essays, reports.
This keeps in check a love triangle story that, if it were more interested in itself, would be absurdly conventional. However, the characters themselves aren't all that bothered about their emotional lives. It is their environs which obsess them. They'll settle for desultory encounters and secrets hardly worth the keeping. What is important is keeping moving, encountering more lessness.
The book's obvious high point comes towards the end, when Kit finds herself alone among the nomads, travelling across the desert. (Mehari, in case you don't know, means 'racing dromedary'.)
At the hour when the sun shone its hottest, they came within sight of an oasis. The dunes here levelled off to make the terrain nearly flat. In a landscape made grey by too much light, the few hundred palms at first were no more than a line of darker grey at the horizon – a line which varied in thickness as the eye beheld it, moving like a slow-running liquid: a wide band, a long grey cliff, nothing at all, then once more the thin pencilled border between the earth and the sky. She watched the phenomenon dispassionately, extracting a piece of bread from the pocket of her coat which lay spread across the ungainly shoulders of the mehari. The bread was completely dry
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles is out now in Penguin paperback
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