Desert-ed

As I've noted many times in these entries, I know very little about most of the books I am reading here.  And I am perpetually amazed at my inability to see where any of these novels end up.  See my last entry about Greene's The Heart of the Matter for a perfect example of an unexpected turn.  I'd like to think that my failure to predict has nothing to do with my being an inattentive or weak reader.  Instead, I think that it is because I don't know what the novel is about until the ending twists my neck along with the plot.

It will not surprise you to learn, then, that Paul Bowles throws me for yet another loop with his novel The Sheltering Sky.

At the start of the novel, Bowles sets up the characters, their competing desires, and the tensions that will fuel their interactions.  Port and Kit are independently wealthy New York intellectuals who are traveling in Northern Africa to see some part of the world untouched by the war.  The couple is estranged sexually, though they still have many affections for each other and appear to be best friends.  Port is searching for something genuinely not European or American, something original, something primal.  Kit, while very like Port, would much rather be in Italy or France.  Neither likes the heat, the people, or the Europeanized city that they begin in, but Port wants to move deeper into the Sahara desert, fascinated by its raw wildness.  Port wants a solitary experience, but he wants Kit to share it with.  Kit is a believer in omens and sign and does not care to glimpse into the power beyond them.  Even the recounting of dreams shakes Kit to her foundation as she fear what's at the route of them.  In one of the happier moments, Port and Kit rent bicycles and go riding out to the dunes, where they park and watch the sunset.  For Kit, "Sunset is such a sad hour."  But for Port, "It was such places as this, such moments that he loved above all else in life. . . .  And although he was aware that the very silences and emptinesses that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that."  He hoped she "would be touched in the same way as he by solitude and the proximity to infinite things," but of course, they merely terrified her.  But for this critical difference, the two seem very well suited to each other, and both overthink their actions and reactions and fail again and again to make the connection they want.

Complicating matters is their traveling companion, Tunner, a good looking man several years younger than they who was captivated by the couple and gladly followed them to Africa.  He is a perfect foil for Port.  Tunner appears to be shallow with a surface of kindness and good-spiritedness that drives Kit crazy.  The other Eurpean characters are Mr. Lyle and the woman he claims is his mother. 

It is among these characters and their interaction that the stage is set, and foolishly I thought the stage was set for interpersonal drama.  We have a love triangle (Tunner has a crush on Kit, and the two have a shared night in a train car while Port has traveled ahead with the Lyles).  We have growing tension as the group travels deeper inland away from civilization that they understand and amenities they are used to.  Mr. Lyle turns out to be a thief and makes off with Port's passport, and when Port takes Kit further inland without his passport to avoid meeting Tunner who is returning with his passport, it seems that they couple is bound for trouble.  Will the couple work things out?  Will the love triangle resolve or explode?  Will the missing passport and the inability to prove his identity land Port in trouble with the authorities?  On that final bus ride into the Sahara, port becomes ill, and we wonder will the lack of hospital care force Kit and him into a precarious position?

And just as everything is set up, as all the questions are floating before the reader, the plot crumbles in our hands.  Port dies after an extended period of delirium.  And after hiding the fact of Port's death, Kit steals off into the desert in the middle of the night.  The entire last portion of the novel follows Kit as she encounters strange Arab merchants who take her for a lover and then a wife, disguising her as a boy.  Then after she escapes, she encounters another Arab whom she takes for a lover before he steals all her Francs.

What?!

I did not see that coming.  And it's at that moment, that I always need to re-approach the first two-thirds, the setting up of the story.  Either the writer panicked in the middle of his book and went running off in a blind direction, or the points he built up earlier were not about what I thought they were about.  And sure enough, it becomes apparent that Ports infidelities with Marhnia and his obsession with the blind dancer are not about his infidelities any more than Kit's is.  The girls are that true experience with another world that Port is questing for.  Meanwhile Bowles is letting us know what Kit is like faced with the limits of her knowledge.  Tunner is there not to set up a love triangle, but to propel Port into the desert where he can die alone in a tete-a-tete with the nothingness of being.  That moment is what the novel builds too.  In fact, we are given hints that this is where we are going from the very beginning.

In the first chapter, Port wakes from a nap, and Bowles describes the moving in and out of nothingness, into and out of the room around him, and Port's calm.  This scene is echoed in Port's dying scene in which he enters and leaves the room, balancing between something and nothing.  Losing Port, Kit must face the ugliness of existence and the loss of her only love.  Her experience is further tainted by her guilt and anger, and the result is something of a psychotic break.  Her fear of the nothingness of death is greater than her fear of life and she wanders out into the world no longer afraid wanting to forget all her experiences and knowledge.

Now what happens to her after that is either reality or purely fantasy.  It is gripping and bizarre, but my brain kept revolting against what it was being fed.  I do love the ending however, where Kit re-encounters "civilization" a broken woman who belongs neither among the living or the dead.

The moral of the story (my story, that is) is that we often mistake our misreading of a book for the mis-writing of the tale.  We need to be willing to assume that the writer told the exact tale that he or she wanted to tell, and our anger and frustration that it did not go where we thought it would go (and wanted it to go) is not to be blamed on the book itself.  Part of our job as reader is to wrestle with the text and pull out the meaning that's there.

If you can experience The Sheltering Sky for what it is and not get caught up in what it is not, you are in for a real treat.