THE SHELTERING SKY (318 pp.)—Paul Bowles—New Directions ($2.75).
The marriage of Porter and Katherine Moresby was obviously a flop and their North African jaunt was bringing out the worst in it. In the little Arab town of Bou Noura, they lay on a hotel bed fully clothed, getting drunk on a bottle of Scotch. A mosquito netting kept off the vicious flies, and as they talked, the star-studded African twilight fell and native drums kept up an insistent rhythm. Being wealthy and intense young New York intellectuals, Kit and Port Moresby glibly fell into lingo so appropriate that Noel Coward might have written it in a fit of melancholia.
Kit: Some people have to work very hard for a tear. Others can have them just for the thinking.
Port: If it comes out even, it's only because the final sum is zero.
Kit: The end of the bottle. Perhaps a perfect zero is something to reach.
When Author Paul Bowles finishes with them in The Sheltering Sky, his first novel, Port has slipped through his zero into death by typhoid, and Kit's zero has become a noose plaited from strands of nymphomania and insanity. All this may be taken straight as simply a lurid, supersexy Sahara adventure story completely outfitted with camel trains, handsome Arabs, French officers and a harem. Nonetheless, The Sheltering Sky is a remarkable job of writing, with a craftsmanship that makes it the most interesting first novel to come from a U.S. writer this year.
Author Bowles, 38, a composer and former music critic, has lived since 1947 in the casbah of Tangier. His little-magazine verse and a handful of short stories had already won him cheers from Manhattan's horizon-watching literati. The Sheltering Sky, with its mixture of emotional nausea, intellectual despair and desert primitivism, will come close to justifying their hopes.
Yet for so able a writer, Bowles fails to give his story much significance. Both Port and Kit are neurotic intellectual playchildren so short on real character and appeal that they seem hardly worth saving. The death of one and the madness of the other seem appropriate but by no means tragic ends. Much as she cares for Port, Kit makes love to his best friend and tripmate, Tunner, in a train compartment, again on a sand dune as Port lies dying. Kit and Port, with their indistinct backgrounds and motives, are largely novelist's puppets, and Tunner is a collard lightweight who is used to fill out the classic triangle.
But Bowles scores cleanly with his minor characters: Arab pimps and prostitutes, French officers in garrison towns, a stupidly tiresome pair of tourists—mother & son. Above all, The Sheltering Sky is drenched with a fine sense of place, and it sketches Arab towns and the Sahara itself with sharp sureness. Bowles may have missed the center of the target with his central characters, but he has given them a supporting cast and an exciting setting that a good many more practiced novelists can honestly envy.