BOOKS
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an Arab boy. Significantly, it gains from its concerns with society.
The
woman's yearly retreat to the peace of the desert is based on a travel–
poster conception of tranquillity that screens out most of the picture. She
can never stop teaching, in an enlightened colonial spirit, the little boy
whom she grows to love. Polite friendship is the only possible arrange–
ment for these two because she will always give in the wrong way and
he will always use her. Her European morality, his devious Arab
practicality will make them blind to the other's needs. The Swiss woman
is forced to leave the desert because of the Algerian War, the sort of
historic occasion which is rare in Bowles.
It
is not an intrusion upon the
tenderness of the story, but a fact which makes
The Time of Friendship
more than a delicate tale. Only the war will set the spinster and the boy
free of each other - each to live with his own disappointment and his
own possibilities. Of course, Bowles is too intricate to let the war simply
enhance his characters with cultural implications: it enters more deeply
into the woman's psyche, exposing the nature of her love:
She saw her own crooked, despairing smile in the dark window–
glass beside her face. Maybe Slimane would be among the for–
tunate ones, an early casualty.
"If
only death were absolutely certain
in wartime," she thought wryly, "the waiting would not be so
painful."
In another story, "The Hours After Noon," the shoddy morality of a
British matron is played off against a real, though decadent, sensuality
of one of the guests at her pension. Again Bowles lets us get hold of some
easy associations and then with great artistry proceeds to transform
the familiar setup into a real horror for which we must find a fresh
response.
A social context was intentionally absent in
The Sheltering Sky.
New York and Paris are shadowy cities and the people have dim,
if
not
mysterious, pasts. The affair between the heroine and the family friend
is
the one attempt to play against the middle class, but is seen as
unimportant, even degrading in comparison to the intensity of loneli–
ness and torture which she shares with her husband. There was time in
the novel for us to feel the absence of society and its usual claims, and
room for Bowles to create a whole world of loveless alienation, but this is
not true of many of the stories, where we are given a shorthand - the
desert, the tropics,
kit -
which does not transcribe in any emotional sense
into aridity, stagnation or mindless hallucination.
Another splendid story in the collection, "The Frozen Fields,"
centers on the dreamlike quality of a child trying to piece together the
terrible world of adults. It
is
set on an American farm at Christmas
time, almost exotic territory for Bowles, but he knows it thoroughly-
