PIECES OF LIGHT

No less a savage indictment of rural English life than was its predecessor (ULVERTON, 1992), Thorpe’s newest epic is at once more personal and more profound as it details the mysteries and tragedies of a child born in Africa and transported to his uncle’s house in England for schooling. In his old age he discovers the mindbending truth about his past. Young Hugh Arkwright’s memories of interior Africa—where after WWI his father served as a minion of the British Empire in a rotting outpost squeezed between a dark river and a darker jungle—were memories anyone might have of home and a pleasant childhood. Only when packed off to creepy Uncle Edward’s cold stone manor, bereft of his parents and pining for the warmth and wonder of Africa as revealed to him by one of the native servants, does Hugh’s vision darken—and, literally, an eye already weakened by malarial fever fail him completely. After a few years of brutal public school, Edward’s peculiar pantheistic views are lightened only by his mother’s brief visits in summer, but then, just as he’s recovering one winter from a bout of pneumonia, he has dreadful news of her: she walked into the jungle and vanished. Much later Hugh, long a well-known director of classical theater, comes back as an old man to that house in the west of England, having inherited it following the death of Edward’s much younger wife. He finds in the attic a trunk that when he pries it open proves to be a Pandora’s box. From the institution where he’s been placed after his subsequent breakdown Hugh recounts, in a series of painful but therapy-related letters to his long-lost mother, the whole tawdry tale of his one love, the murder he was believed to have committed, and his shock at learning who he really is. Plot details don’t do this eerie, mood-laced saga justice, but driving the novel along with the central mystery, skillfully suspended, is as somber and compelling a view of folklore and folkways as has been seen in fiction in some time.