Port’s passport is stolen and it’s dangerous to be a foreigner with no identifying papers. Port, who has his suspicions about his wife’s trysts, engineers it so that Eric gives Tunner a lift to the next city on the pretext that Kit and Port will catch him up in a few days. It is during this long train journey that Tunner makes a pass at his friend, setting into motion a convoluted love triangle in which Kit constantly plays off her lover with her husband. Port accepts, but Kit and Tunner go by train because there’s not enough room for all of them in the vehicle. Later, when the trio meet a young Australian traveller, Eric, and his mother, Mrs Lyle, a travel writer (whose vile views on Arabs and Jews make for uncomfortable reading), staying at the same hotel, they are offered a ride to Boucif by car. In the opening chapters, for instance, Port spends a night with a local prostitute (a pattern that repeats throughout the novel) and puts himself in danger of being robbed or mugged. And she had accompanied him without reiterating her complaints too often or too bitterly.īut while the trio take their time moving around the country - this Google Map I found online helpfully charts their journey - there are tensions at play. Before the war, it had been Europe and the Near East, during the war the West Indies and South America. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to the other.
The difference is partly one of time, he would explain.
They don’t have a proper itinerary, they simply move from place to place when they feel like a change of scenery because, as Port puts it, they are not tourists but travellers: Port and Kit Moresby*, a sophisticated American couple from New York, are exploring Morocco and Algeria with their friend Tunner. Part horror, part suspense (part WTF is going on?), it’s a chilling tale about strangers in a strange land and the unforeseen fates that can await the naive traveller. It’s a rather enigmatic tale about a young American couple travelling through French North Africa after the Second World War, but what begins as a typical story (albeit in an atypical setting) of a marriage on the rocks morphs into something else entirely. Fiction – paperback Flamingo Modern Classic 285 pages 1993.įirst published in 1949, The Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles‘ (1910-1999) debut novel.
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