SOURCE: Thorpe, Michael. “Cast Out of Eden.” World and I 15, no. 3 (March 2000): 278.

[In the following review, Thorpe discusses the narrative complexity of Pieces of Light.]

Pieces of Light is an intriguing, finely spun mystery, most aptly entitled. Readers are led on a long journey of remembering, along shadowy paths resembling those in a tropical forest whose canopy occasionally admits bits and pieces of light. In subject matter, alternating between “darkest” Africa and an England that, to borrow the words of Conrad's narrator in Heart of Darkness, is also “one of the dark places of the earth,” it is sometimes obscure. However, although in his closing acknowledgments Thorpe names “certain books that have travelled with [him],” the reader need not turn to those. Doing so would only authenticate some of Thorpe's more arcane themes and allusions, not solve the mystery. Paramount among the novel's themes is that of human sacrifice, throughout both the narrative and human history.

AFRICAN ‘GOLDEN AGE’

The first of the novel's five parts is a memoir by the narrator, Hugh Arkwright, of his early childhood in the British-administered part of the Cameroons. He is six when his story opens, in 1927, in remote Barmakum. He has never lived anywhere else and doesn't expect to. His world is African, and so is he. His closest companion is the 16-year-old Quiri, who secretly teaches the boy his own tribal language. Hugh learns of many mysteries—of the notorious Mr. Hargreaves, his father's predecessor as D.O. (district officer) who had killed in sacrificial manner the “hairy man,” or gorilla, which is buried nearby and whose spirit must be guarded against. Such things reach him through a veil of half-understanding, as do his mother Charlotte's hints that he—“the only white child in the whole of West and Central Africa, that I know of”—will not long remain African.

Fearing that he will “go native,” as whites such as Hargreaves were liable to do, she intends sending Hugh “home” when he is seven. Hugh misreads her hints as meaning he may be sacrificed: He knows from Quiri it had been a local custom, suppressed by the British, that he innocently equates with Christianity's “and he gave his only begotten son.” His child's logic broaches a related theme, which questions how civilization is different from and superior to paganism. Another is voiced by a trader to his anxious, rational mother and overheard by Hugh: “Fact and fiction are just what Africa makes sure you can't sort out, Mrs. Arkwright.”

Although such complex themes will burden the mature Hugh, as a child his early world is paradise, his African dream “to settle with my parents and Quiri beside the crater lake,” to grow to maturity and die “an old and wise man, to feel the twine of my life cut and to float away to join the other ancestors.” He has seen death, feared hostile spirits, and knows nature—the mamba or “Billy Hartzia's” snails (bilharzia)—can kill. Quiri has taught him how to make a fetish, for magical protection against those. Before Hugh leaves for England, Quiri cuts a tribal mark in his nape. The England he is “sacrificed to” portends a cold and dead season; his dispatch to his mother's brother Edward and his Aunt Joy is felt as a rejection. He confronts his mother with a moment of shocking estrangement when he exaggerates (hoping it will save him from exile) his difficulty in seeing from one eye. Though the true significance of his mother's shock is hidden from him, this adumbrates the motif of sight: Hugh, who later literally becomes one-eyed, is a seeker who glimpses “pieces of light.”

THE FALL INTO ENGLAND

Hugh's mother takes him to Ulverton, a village in the rolling Berkshire downland, where he is to live in the dark, rambling house Illythia, with his middle-aged, childless uncle and aunt. He feels like “a piece broken off something.” In what H. J. Massingham calls “this wild and inspiriting land” (English Downland, 1936), he encounters no familiar spirits and seems odd to other children who are repelled by his talk of fetishes and protective charms. Their parents think him a pagan. His mother's return to Africa leaves him feeling betrayed and isolated. This intensifies as the years pass: Sent away to prep school, he suffers his full share of baitings and beatings, relieved only by his mother's brief annual visits. His painful love for her is “too real.”

Uncle Edward who, like Hugh's father, had lost his faith in the Great War's trenches, now pursues archaeological research, excavating prehistoric graves and studying Druidism. Hugh's mother thinks “a time before history offered him a way out.” Soured by the falsely sacrificial war, fascinated by the human propensity for self-destruction, Edward becomes obsessed with the possibility of genuine human sacrifice. Hugh's mother takes this up, in a conversation Hugh overhears, and explains that the practice isn't “quite dead.” She describes the practice of lycanthropy in West Africa and the murderous leopard societies. When she talks of the leopard man's borfima, or fetish, she says it must be kept oiled or it turns against its owner. Hearing this, Hugh fears his personal fetish bundle will disintegrate.

Certainly, it cannot save him from a hated school, nor keep his mother and father (who visits once) in England. The adult world, as he glimpses it, is discordant and quickly disintegrates. Aunt Joy soon dies, estranged by Edward's obsession, leaving Hugh alone with an uncle he secretly believes would sacrifice him, the “nearest and dearest,” to ensure the spread of a treasured scrap of ancient forest (the wildwood), the English counterpart to Hugh's jungle. This fear arises after Charlotte disappears into that jungle—“very bad news” that, to Edward's amazement, the 12-year-old Hugh receives smiling. Denying her death, he imagines her gone to “a hot, green paradise” by the crater lake where, for fleeting days before he left Africa, he felt blissfully happy with his parents.

STUMBLING UPON THE PAST

A transitional third part plunges us into a series of dated diary entries. Although no year is given, Hugh is now, at seventy, retiring from a successful career as actor and theater director—a likely vocation for one who peopled his lonely childhood with individual performances of Shakespeare. As a director he was noted for reviving seventeenth-century acting techniques (derided by a hostile critic as “a fetishistic superstition for the past”). Thorpe's acknowledgments include Joseph Roach's The Player's Passion (1995), where such passages as these seem apt to what ensues in the novel: “The passions are easily summoned from the lower regions, but, like devils, once summoned are not easily put back” and, of the protean actor, “he who can assume any shape is in danger of losing his own.”

In retirement Hugh plans a book on his theatrical practice and considers turning his long-dead uncle's derelict Illythia into a theatrical research center. Returning there, for the first time since Edward's second wife's death fifteen years before, he is drawn instead into an inadequately buried past. Sorting his papers, Hugh comes across the memoir we have read and revisits it, remembering it was an attempt, encouraged by a Dr. Wolff, to come to terms with his mother's disappearance. That was thirty years ago, but he still believes “there was no death.” In Ulverton, the elderly Gracie Hobbs claims “I saw your mother walking on the day of her death,” while mysterious sightings of a Red Lady in local lore prompt Hugh's recollection that his mother bought a bright red coat before her last return to Africa. When he finds in Illythia's attic a trunk from Africa with a label dated 21 December, 1933, “the most likely date of her disappearance” there, he wonders if she actually returned to England because he was then seriously ill. Did she disappear in England?

Hugh's lifelong obsession with his mother is only equaled by his loathing for his uncle, the “old goat” who, mysteriously, deprived him of “my one and only true love.” There is some suggestion that this was his Aunt Rachael, Edward's second wife, remembered by Hugh as “a sad, bitter mystery” but also, he is disgusted to learn, in salacious stories told in the village. More disturbingly, he renews an old suspicion that his uncle may have been crazy enough to sacrifice his “red” mother, a symbol of life and “the nearest and dearest,” to further the mystical renewal of the land. A further sinister suggestion attaches to Hugh's rediscovery of the leopard skin his father had tanned, whose animal spirit would, according to Quiri, one day reclaim it.

Hugh skirts the unopened trunk, fearful of disturbing discoveries. His last diary entry reads baldly “Horrible. Absolutely horrible.” Since Hugh has begun to speculate about what Conrad's Marlow termed “unspeakable rites,” one inevitably recalls Mr. Kurtz's last recorded words in Heart of Darkness, “The horror, the horror.”

DYSFUNCTIONAL COMMUNICATIONS

The novel's longest, fourth part resumes the narrative a year later, surprisingly in the form of letters in the present tense to Hugh's mother. Since his horrible shock, he will not speak and is apparently now in a sanatorium where he has been encouraged to correspond with Charlotte in a therapeutic narrative of his haunted life since her disappearance: “I am to go with the pain, they said.”

We must grasp the novel backwards, reliving with Hugh the events that caused his breakdown and the mystery that envelops him which neither he nor we can wholly unravel. This new memoir leads to belated recognition of his “dysfunctional” life. At its heart are obsessive, ill-requited attachments to two women: his vanished mother and his first and only love Rachael, who, in a shocking act of betrayal, conveyed in the first of his life's two shattering letters, announces she has indeed become Uncle Edward's second wife and thus, ironically, Hugh's aunt. Engineering his misfortunes, he believes, was “Nuncle,” the crazed, misanthropic “demon.”

Hugh describes to his mother the shy, idealizing growth of his love for the seemingly free-spirited Rachael, though feeling in retrospect that “I was abandoning you, Mother, for a girl I scarcely knew.” He plans their first idyllic lovemaking for May Day on the downs, as if it were a sacred rite, but it will prove only the beginning of a bad chain of events. Ominously, Rachael becomes fascinated by Nuncle's apocalyptic mysticism, a hybrid of Nordic myth—played out in his Thule Society with boisterous and suspect “jolly Germans”—and African beliefs that, Hugh comments, “he poisoned … for me, so I let them fade away.” But they will resurface.

World War II fatally separates the lovers, and it is Hugh's turn to perform in a sacrificial drama far beyond Nuncle's imaginings. As a flight observer, he is involved in the bombing of Germany: Wotan bombing “the jollymen [turned Nazis] of the Thule Society” and, with less justice, creating “blistered babies and charred old women.” Thorpe convincingly imagines the tenuous lives and disturbed minds of Hugh and his fellow aviators, with their fetishes and superstitions (one recalls Randall Jarrell's poem “Eighth Air Force”). Thorpe has, like Pat Barker, author of the Great War “Regeneration” trilogy, no direct war experience but was in 1987 cofounder of the English Newbury Campaign Against Cruise Missiles.

In Hugh's life, the pattern hardens. Saturation bombing, sacrificing innocents, was in its time justified as a morally superior necessity. Other sacrificial acts may be seen as those of Hugh's father and his kind to “civilize” Africa and Nuncle's fantasy of an England cleansed of humanity and returned to pristine wildwood. Hugh's worst suspicion of this man, whom he sometimes compares to Hitler, is that Nuncle may actually have sacrificed Charlotte. He links local lore of her apparition with the prehistoric corpse of the Red Lady of Paviland. Finally, with growing paranoia, Hugh sees himself as sacrificed, initially, as Rachael had once suggested, at his mother's hands—“dropping you off here like a piece of baggage.”

Opening the mysterious trunk reveals a fetish box, containing “a red-tinted skull-bit, Mother, though I'm not sure it's yours.” (Prehistoric corpses, like the Red Lady, were covered with ocher, meant like blood to strengthen the dead en route to the underworld.) The contents of this box and the rediscovered but strangely disappearing leopard skin now become properties in a sensational mystery that thickens when Hugh becomes further disturbed by the salacious gossip that besmirches the memory of his young love for Rachael. This horrible discovery may or may not be connected with the grisly murder of a villager who has incensed Hugh with obscenely suggestive talk of “Randy Rachael.” Hugh volunteers the theory that the death is one only a wild beast could have caused—but in Ulverton, albeit once Wolf Town? Or was the killer, in a state of animal-spirit possession, actually Hugh? The novel here turns gothic, and Hugh himself parallels Illythia with the House of Usher.

A murder suspect for a while, Hugh is soon released, but the reader remains uncertain. The narrator is seriously disturbed and acts like a hunted animal at bay. Several factors combine to unbalance him: unresolved suspicion about his mother's death, a second terrible letter revealing that “I am not who I thought I was,” and unexorcised war guilt. Hugh acknowledges that wisdom urges “Put away childish things” but asks, “What remains, Mother?” Not fame and success: only “a certain long moment lost in Africa.” As his letters close, he promises his mother to return there. The rest is silence.

CHARLOTTE'S LETTERS

The concluding part of Pieces of Light prints the trunk's most disturbing contents, copies of ten letters typed by Hugh's mother to Edward and his wife from November 2, 1920, on her arrival in the Cameroons, to May 1, 1922, when she reports she has a son. What the last letter relates of his origin gives Hugh a sense of violation so intense that he convinces himself his uncle forged the whole “bundle of foul lies.” Yet the earlier letters, “so young and bright and funny”—qualities beyond his uncle—convince us they are genuine. Their ebullient style resembles that of the Victorian Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa, which Charlotte read on the voyage out. They also illustrate the talent for pastiche Thorpe displays in his first novel, Ulverton.

In the later letters Charlotte's style darkens, becomes Conradian. Her lively curiosity and early idealism give way to a growing cynicism and fear of the “occult rhythms” of Africa, to which her gin-drinking husband seems to be succumbing, as had his predecessor Hargreaves, a character akin to Conrad's Kurtz, though more fully revealed.

The letters partly unravel the mystery and cause of Hugh's breakdown. In the novel's structure, the disenchantment Charlotte undergoes contrasts with her son's memoir of an Eden he “never wanted to leave”—and perhaps never has. One may interpret Hugh's mature preoccupation with “theatrical decorum” as a ritual of restraint, like the suppression, not exorcism, of his savage war experience. He knows “I can be a man and a beast”—the “beast,” presumably, kills without conscience. This is not to read “beast” as synonymous with “African”: rather, there is an essential human affinity, in the sense pinpointed by Malinowski, the anthropologist—“superstition, blind faith and complete disorientation are as dangerous a canker in the heart of Western civilization as in Africa” (introduction, Facing Mount Kenya, by Jomo Kenyatta, 1938). Mary Kingsley, long before the Great War or Hitler's menacing thirties, had in turn-of-the-century Africa seen each Christian European nation as “ready to take out a patent for a road to Heaven and make that road out of men's blood and bones and the ashes of burnt homesteads.” Strangely, though, Hitler's “massive ceremony of sacrifice” (Harold Kaplan) is only indirectly glanced at.

Pieces of Light joins the ever-lengthening line of British anti- and post-colonial fiction, from Conrad to Lessing, Golding, J. G. Farrell, and, recently, Tim Jeal's For God and Glory, to articulate the split in the “civilized” psyche and revise the meanings of civilization and savagery in the searing light of twentieth-century history. As Hugh, in silent exile from his African Eden, writes, “No other beast talks.”