SOURCE: "Journies to the Interior: The African Stories of Audrey Thomas," in The Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 44, 1982, pp. 98-110.

When Margaret Laurence arrived in North Africa in the 1950s the first real African she met was the man who was to be her steward, Mohamed, so eager to help and yet so difficult to understand. In The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963) she recalls watching Mohamed's face silhouetted against the African sky above the ship's launch: "It was a face I could not read at all," she writes, "a well-shaped brown face that seemed expressionless, as though whatever lay behind his eyes would be kept carefully concealed. I wondered if this was the face of Africa."

Of course Margaret Laurence's Africa was Somaliland, as different from Audrey Thomas's Ghana as desert can be from tropical rainforest; as brightness and heat are from darkness and damp. Which makes the similarities between Thomas's reactions to Africa and those of Margaret Laurence all the more remarkable—and makes us suspect they arise more from similarities in the eyes of the beholders than in the two Africas. In Thomas's earliest African story, "Xanadu," the first African to appear is the man who was supposed to be her steward, a drunken parasite who, when fired, quickly metamorphoses into the upright Joseph—the model and prototype of all Thomas's future stewards—who listens "impassive yet without hostility" while the narrator loudly mistakes him for his predecessor. Audrey Thomas too is having trouble with the faces of Africa. Throughout the rest of her nine African stories she studies these faces as if they were little maps, seeking in them directions or instructions for her own predetermined route toward—what? Self-discovery? A kind of African Genesis?

Africa has opened herself before to this kind of exploration. George Woodcock has described The Prophet's Camel Bell (a "travel book" in the same sense as Audrey Thomas's stories are "travel fiction") as "a narrative in which an inner journey and an arrival at a personal destination run parallel." (Here we may as well admit straight off that Thomas's characters rarely arrive at a destination, personal or otherwise: as with death and certain airline advertisements, it's the voyage there that counts.) The epigram that Dave Godfrey chose from the Religio Medici—"We carry within us all the wonders we seek without us. There is all Africa and her prodigies in us"—for his novel The New Ancestors invokes this inner Africa as well. In an interview published in 1975 in the Capilano Review (the same issue that carried "Two in the Bush") Thomas referred to Woodcock's ideas that Canadian writers liked Africa because that was where (she said) "you step back...in order to view your own country." She adds (in the nick of time), "I'm not sure it's as simple as that." You can step just as far back in France or Greece or Mexico (settings for other Thomas stories), but you do not look into the wizened visage of a French peasant and wonder if you are gazing upon the face of France. And if you do, it is not in order to gain a new perspective on Canada.

Africa has appealed to Western writers—not only to European writers—because it is so unEuropean. It is where European culture meets with the primitive, where assumptions are confronted by givens, where the intellectual side of the human penny, with its Latin or French or Portuguese or English inscription, is replaced by a mute black face when the penny flips over as if by magic on the table. In the interview mentioned above Thomas quotes with approval a passage from Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (a title which, by the way, pretty well describes Thomas's own work): "In travelling to Africa to find a psychic observation post outside of the European, I unconsciously wanted to find that part of my personality which had become invisible under the influence and pressure of being European." Perhaps Thomas felt that parts of her personality had become invisible under the influence and pressure of being American: when one of the interviewers asks the surprising question, "Do you find Africa a less threatening environment than Canada though?" Thomas replies, "Oh yeah, sure." "Your Heart of Darkness is Canada?" pursues the interviewer. "I think so. Yes." And in one of Thomas's later African stories ("Rapunzel") an artist named Caroline "dreams her way" up and down the dark continent, searching for "images. Forms. Old ways of looking at the world."

Thomas made two trips to Africa, one in the mid-1960s and another five years later in 1970. The two trips produced two novels—Mrs. Blood (1970), and Blown Figures (1975)—and nine short stories, scattered over a period of about thirteen years, and included, along with twenty-four other stories in Thomas' three collections. Ten Green Bottles (1967) included "Xanadau," "Omo," and "One is One and All Alone"; Ladies and Escorts (1977), in which "Joseph and His Brother," "Two in the Bush," and "Rapunzel" appeared; and Real Mothers (1981), which had "Out in the Midday Sun" and "Timbuktu." The ninth African story "Degrees," was read in 1982 on CBC Anthology and included in Robert Weaver's collection, Small Wonders. "Omo," "Joseph and His Brother," and "Two in the Bush" are also reprinted in Two in the Bush and other stories (1981). "Two in the Bush", published for the first time in the interview issue of Capilano Review, bears the following preface: "Ten years ago [i.e. 1965] I went to Ghana and spent two years there with my husband and two small children. Five years after my return to Canada I had a chance to go back for a few months and gather material for a proposed novel. I decided to visit some of the neighbouring countries as well, and this story is something that came out of my visit to the former French protectorate of the Ivory Coast." And she goes on to explain who Kwame Nkrumah is (without mentioning that he wrote a book called Neo-Colonialism), in order to show us that she was not totally unaware of the political Africa even though her stories—like all good travel stories—take place in a kind of unpoliticized mythical vacuum.

After the 1965 trip Thomas wrote the three African stories—"Xanadu", "Omo", and "One Is One and All Alone"—that appeared in her first short-story collection, Ten Green Bottles (1967). She also wrote her first African novel, Mrs. Blood (1970), and the "proposed novel" that took her back to Africa was presumably Blown Figures (1974).

The opening sentence of "Xanadu" is mock biblical: "In the beginning it was hardly paradise"—and more echoes of Genesis reverberate throughout the story. Joseph the steward, like his Old Testament namesake, is a good, honest, patient man who is persecuted for his maddening virtuousness. He is the perfect servant—fixes mosquito nets, anticipates rainstorms and closes the windows in time, intermediates in the market square—and Mary's (she is nameless in the story, the anonymous wife of Jason, but since Jason and Joseph both appear in their appointed roles in Mrs. Blood I am taking the liberty of giving her Mrs. Blood's name, Mary) initial shock slips instantly into "a golden chalice of contentment." That golden chalice has an ominous heft for anyone mindful of the Joseph story in Genesis. When Mary notices that her family has come to rely more on Joseph's attentiveness than on her own housewifely negligence (Joseph's day off, Sunday, becomes a weekly ordeal of burned toast, cold potatoes, and tears: "After all," she whines, "in the terrible hear, with a cantankerous stove, they could hardly expect her to be perfect"), something "as infinitisimal as a grain of sand in an oyster" begins to pick at the back of her consciousness: jealousy. Still, as in Eden (and here her symbolism gets a bit ponderous), "except for the incident of snake, things might have gone on, indefinitely, very much as before." The statement is a very synopsis not just of Genesis but of the whole history of Europe.

Mary is terrified of the large python insinuating itself in her garden: Joseph slays same. One can hardly get more mythopoetic in a single short story—even one called "Xanadu." Bathos follows, as in life: Mary feels "somehow in his debt" and, to expiate her guilt by compounding it, she plants three silver spoons in Joseph's bedroom while he is off expediting things for her at the market. In short, she betrays her Joseph just as the biblical brethren betrayed theirs. The story, which ends in betrayal, is continued in our heads: spoons discovered missing, search made, spoons found, horror expressed, Joseph (as "impassive yet without hostility" as ever) dismissed.

Mary fears Joseph more, and more deeply, than she fears the snake because he interferes with her own sense of herself as a person, as a woman (this is a story about Thomas's first trip to Africa, remember, when her female characters were still recognizably women). Until Joseph she was able to entertain comforting and easy assumptions about who she is: she is a housewife and a mother. "Housewife" in this context takes on a dangerous dimension because of the identification it makes between Mary's house and her body; Joseph threatens her role in the house, and therefore becomes identified in her mind as a threat to her body. She is, of course, intelligent enough to recognize all this as so much meaningless twaddle. After all, every sensibly born Englishwoman (her husband is English) has to learn how to "cope" (there is a longish fiddle in Mrs. Blood about the word "cope" in which it is made to fade into the word "hope") with servants. But as Thomas writes in a later story, "the white man is ashamed to be afraid of Africa and yet the shame does not completely obliterate the fear." Quite the contrary: the mixture of shame and fear produces cunning, even low cunning. At this point Joseph is Africa, but Mary, newly arrived, is not yet quite sure what Africa is (in fact Mary will never be; when she dies and is reborn as Isobel and Nora in later stories she is allowed a glimpse, or more literally an inkling). Joseph therefore is constantly changing costumes in Mary's feverish view: at one point he appears "like a huge black Prospero", a few paragraphs later he has changed into "another Ariel with hosts of spirits at his command" (which would in fact make him still Prospero, but never mind). The point is that Joseph smudges the line between master and slave ("he serves without being servile—if you know what I mean"), a line that two thousand years of European history has tried to make indelible but which Mary, being American, is half inclined to try to erase anyway. Like Prospero's island, like Xanadu, Africa is both paradise and real world, both stately pleasure dome and the source of a sacred and mysterious river that runs down to a sunless sea. And as the oriental setting for Coleridge's dream-poem, it is also the place where East meets West.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must he," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here." 

The quotation is from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and is Thomas's introductory epigram to Mrs. Blood. It's an interesting choice: a children's book that has had its greatest success with childish adults (or precocious children—at any rate, the same set that would later find its mental chewing gum in Tolkien). Alice's two vehicles are the rabbit hole and, later, the looking glass, the latter being the more intellectually striking device. The Thomas stories that resulted from her first trip to Africa have more of the rabbit hole about them, "Xanadu" being an account of her fall, her gradual shrinking, and the two others being a description of the creatures she meets at the bottom. "Omo" is the story of Walter's fetish (Walter is a black American Peace Corps teacher of English who has been sent to Africa, where he shares a house with the narrator, a white slug called, in Walter's diary, E.K.) for an African anesthetist at the hospital. The anesthetist, whose name is Omo (which means "whiter than white") is an albino—"He looked kind of poached, if you know what I mean," remarks E.K., who is a math teacher—and Walter sees in him a terrifying symbol of the extent to which he, Walter, has been assimilated into the white world. Walter undergoes a kind of crise de negritude: after successfully wooing E.K.'s girlfriend Miranda (we are still on Prospero's island), he disappears. Omo is discovered in an advanced state of decomposition, his head having been bashed in (the ultimate anesthetic), and E.K., having enigmatically changed his name to Jonsson, is left with the aid of a bottle of gin to sort the whole thing out.

The final African story in Ten Green Bottles is "One Is One and All Alone", a long interior monologue from a woman sinking deeper and deeper into the profound indifference of clinical depression—"Depressionism," Thomas calls it in another story; Impressionism carried to its most morbid extreme. The woman is nameless but resembles Mary from "Xanadu" (the steward, though called Samuel, is really Joseph in disguise). The husband is away, the two children mercifully unaware that their mother is stalking about the house in mortal, irrational terror for their safety. Depression of this sort is a form of premature menopause, and it is depicted here with nightmarish fidelity: "She had discovered that she did not have to leave the house if she did not choose, for her husband had stocked up well before he left. . . . This morning she had smiled shyly at the woman in the mirror. 'You see? I'm not such a bad sort after all.' She even toyed with the idea of getting someone to take her into town, buying some material, having her hair done. 'Why can't you drive yourself?' the woman in the mirror said, rather sternly. 'It isn't as though he had taken the car.' But she shrugged her shoulders ('You know why') and refused to become involved or irritated."

The woman-in-the-mirror is important. She has been introduced earlier in the story in cunning tandem with another recurring phantom, the wrestling match between reality and romanticism: "She would have liked to live in a solid, square, beautifully ugly house like that [she has been contemplating a photograph on a calendar]. Safe, ugly, beautiful and cool. 'You're being romantic,' said her heavy-eyed reflection in the mirror. 'Ah no,' she waggled her finger severely at this other woman. 'If I were romantic I should like it here. Colour, light, eternal summer—and servants. I am not romantic—somebody else is,' she muttered darkly to the other woman, then slammed the top down hard, and smiled." Lewis Carrol's eminently Victorian Cat was right.

During her first trip to Africa, Audrey Thomas had a miscarriage, and wrote Mrs. Blood (as well as her first published short story, "If One Green Bottle . . . "). Five years later she returned to Africa, alone, to work on Blown Figures, a novel about a woman who is returning to Africa, alone, to (as the jacket flap on the American edition says) "heal the emotional ravages of a miscarriage and the older wounds that lie beneath it." The woman is named Isobel. "When I went back I went alone" Thomas says in the interview, "and that seemed to be a very good thing. I think I do better alone, which is a very sad statement about me, than I do when I travel with other people. Sometimes I really have to force myself to go down the rabbit hole when I'm alone."

The stories from Thomas's second African trip, with the exception of "Joseph and His Brother" with its echoes of "Xanadu" and "One Is One", have more to do with the looking-glass—the woman-in-the-mirror—than with the rabbit hole. They were collected in Ladies and Escorts (1980). I've already mentioned "Rapunzel", and not much more needs to be said about it except that the girl Caroline is one of California's superannuated hippies who believes herself to be an artist, i.e. she carries a Rapido-Graph instead of a Pentax, but deals in snapshots nonetheless: "some market scenes, the tro-tros [trucks] and a lot of faces." She also indulges in mirror writing, so that her notebook or sketchbook is a kind of dyslexicon of Africa. "Omo" reappears—unlike mere people, some words do not become opposites of themselves in mirrors. The story ends with (we'll call her) Isobel reading from the notebook by holding it up to a mirror, like Alice reading Jabberwocky, Caroline's account of being raped by a black man at the university. Her whole experience of Africa is reduced to entries in a notebook. At one point Isobel asks her: "And did you find any of your 'old Meanings'?" "Some of them, maybe," Caroline replies. "Did you know that when a man is very, very mad up there they chain him to a tree and the whole village looks after him?" The story "Joseph and His Brother" is a linear expansion of this single notebook entry.

A page in Thomas's own African diary, reprinted in part in the same Capilano Review, may serve as a footnote before we move on to "Two in the Bush". In Ghana, truck or "tro-tro" drivers name their trucks as if they were ships. "During Nkrumah's reign," Thomas notes, "a tro-tro driver was arrested by the Special Brigade because he had painted 'Ghana Hard-O' on his lorry. Charged with Treason, I guess. .. . His lawyer was advised to say that what he really meant was Ghana Very Strong-O, that he was an illiterate man and had gone to a sign painter ... " etc. "Man got off with a small fine . . . and was told he must paint out that sign and put something else. He went immediately out of the court and bought some paint and came back to report that he had done this and had painted a new slogan.

'"And what is that?' asked the judge.
'"All Shall Pass.'
"He was arrested again."

In a sense, all of Thomas's earlier African stories are footnotes to "Two in the Bush," for it is in this story that the themes and images of her somewhat fractured history finally come together to make a satisfying whole—a story in which, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare's African story, her truths become a tale where before half-tales had been truths. Here Thomas gives us two women, Mollie and Isobel. Isobel is visiting Africa alone, Mollie is a resident there with her husband as Thomas had been on her first trip: Isobel and Mollie are therefore mirror images of each other, Thomas on trip one facing Thomas on trip two.

The story begins in the City Hotel in Ghana, one of the three hotels that provide the setting for the three sections of the story—hotels, restaurants, museums, these are the constant backdrops of the permanent exile, symbols of transience in a world unsettled (notice how the whole of Tim Findley's Famous Last Words takes place in an endless succession of hotels). Isobel, Mollie and her husband John, a man named Les, and a Ghanaian lawyer and politico named Jimmie Owusu-Banahene are having a Sunday curry lunch. The conversation revolves around politics: Isobel has known Jimmie "since Nkrumah's time" (i.e. since her first trip five years ago) and has just announced her impending journey to the Ivory Coast to meet an Angolan freedom fighter named Marques Kakumba. Why she is going to meet Kakumba is not clear—she is not wholly the same Isobel who appears in Blown Figures, though she is a writer, perhaps a journalist. "I'm not political," she says to Jimmie, and Jimmie scoffs: "Nobody in this world," he tells her, perhaps thinking of the tro-tro driver endlessly arrested for giving his truck an ambiguous name, "is not political." And he goes on to give an almost Soviet list of examples: "When you are born you commit a political act, changin' the census in your village, town or state. When you die you do the same." And we are suddenly reminded of Aki Loba, the Ivory Coast novelist whose first novel, Kocoumbo, may have supplied Thomas with the name Kakumba in a curiously inverted way: "Kocoumbo doesn't like politics," one of Loba's characters protests. "Can you give me the name of a single educated African who doesn't like politics?" replies another character, Durandeau. "Doesn't Kocoumbo sleep and eat and complain about life? Doesn't he bear grudges against other people? Well that's politics!"

Mollie, who suddenly decides to accompany Isobel to the Ivory Coast, is like Mary in "Xanadu" (or Mrs. Blood): for her, Africa is an escape from herself, an "escapade" in the romantic sense of the word. "I could do with a little holiday," she tells her husband. For Isobel, Africa is a way into herself. Even the interview with Kakumba is a pretext: "I wanted to find Africa," she tells herself before the trip. "Was this it? Was this the real Africa? Maybe it would be different in the Ivory Coast." Isobel is also a romantic, though a different kind from Mollie. She is not looking for "the real Africa"—why should she find it in the Ivory Coast when it has eluded her in Ghana?—she is looking for the real Isobel. In Blown Figures she is looking for the child she lost during her first trip—there is something inside her that destroys life, some heart of darkness that has to be found and exposed to the harsh African sun, so the real Isobel can emerge as a life force. The search for the real Isobel is essentially a romantic pursuit. Isobel is trying, unlike Mollie, to resolve the split between romanticism and reality, between her idea of Africa (herself) and the Africa she actually encounters. She is trying to force a crisis—and there is nothing like travelling to bring about a crisis. Mollie, Isobel's former self, the self that had the miscarriage, has more basic needs: she just wants to get laid.

There are many kinds of romanticism. Mollie's is a sexual fantasy land in which the ordinary laws of social conduct are lifted, and a beautiful, wartless whimsy takes over. The world of the Harlequin Romance. Thomas does not reject this world: even some of her more intelligent characters wallow about in it from time to time (see "Initram"—the title is another mirror-word—in which the narrator, a writer, bounces along in a perpetual fantasy world in which writers sit around drinking tea from bone china cups and discussing Djuna Barnes, and handsome strangers, their sailboats tied up because of the storm, wander into the bar and say, "I'll always care what happens to you"). Isobel's romanticism, however, is the literary kind, the kind peopled by Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge ("Xanadu"), which is not so much an escape from reality as a penetration more deeply into it. There is an intriguing echo of both kinds in Arthur McDowall's 1918 book, Realism: A Study in Art and Thought:

Romanticism casts a spell in art, and we all yield to it from time to time, and for some it is the only thing which is profoundly moving. It is the sense of escape which thrills us. Not an escape, always, from ourselves, but from what limits or fetters us. In romance the self may be unfolded, spread out to dream over, free from the pressure of material things.

Elsewhere McDowall makes the connection between romanticism and the kind of inner journey upon which Isobel has embarked:

The romantic art which delights to exhibit and contemplate the self finds an analogue in the philosophical theories which centre round the idea of self-realization. .. . It is the self, and not the things that lie beyond it, which is the real interest; and the universe is only a duplication of it, since it proves to be a second Self, enlarged and glorified.

Africa is Isobel's "duplication" (as in a mirror); it is her "second Self."

In Abidjan, Isobel and Mollie put up at a glorified brothel with a wonderful name: Hôtel Humanité. (Thomas chooses her names carefully. "Mollie" sounds like Mistress Quickly, Isobel echoes Isabel in Measure for Measure. The Hôtel Humanité is on rue des Ecries—an ecrie is a "cry of pain," but may also be a play on the word écrit, "written" as in "it is written.") They stay at this hotel because of the kind of inverted logic (dyslogic) that pervades the story: Kakumba, they know, is staying at the ritzier Hôtel Ivoire (for Ivory Coast, yes, but perhaps also for Milton's Ivory Gates, the entrance to dreamland). At the Ivoire the women become mixed up with the "real" Africa with a vengeance: an American tuna millionaire named Arnie Freitas; a vice-president of the African Development Bank named Alamoody; and of course Kakumba, who may or may not be in league with the American and the banker in a gun-running operation. On their first night in the Hôtel Humanité (after refusing Arnie's hospitality at the Ivoire) they hear the distant sound of drums, like a primeval, absurd heart-beat: "Dadada/Dadada Dadada," and Isobel wonders, "Was that Africa? Was Mr. Alamoody Africa or Joào Kakumba or even Sgt Lee Lillie or Arnie the tuna-fish king? I didn't dream—why should I? Africa was a dream."

The next day, taking up her position again at Jung's "psychic observation post," Isobel pauses as she leaves the hotel to watch an African woman "pounding fou-fou with a long pole. A small child sat at her feet and reached her hand in quickly between the strokes, to turn the soft glutinous mass. Then the pole came down again. Thud. Pause. Thud. Pause. Thud. Like a great heart beating." this is obviously another page from Thomas's African diary, but she turns it neatly into the central image of the story: '"Why not,' I thought. 'Why not just stay on here?' I was romanticizing, of course, but the life of the woman in the courtyard seemed as simple and as regular as the ghud of her fou-fou pounder." Isobel is romanticizing. The woman-inthe-mirror has become the woman in the courtyard, and Isobel has to force herself through the looking glass to become her. But the woman in the courtyard is (in "reality") the wife of the brothel-keeper, the owner of the Hôtel Humanité, and her life is anything but "simple and regular." Isobel isn't interested in the simple and regular life anyway—that's Mollie's brand of romanticism. Isobel wants to believe that the woman in the courtyard is the real Africa, and hence can be the real Isobel. Later at the Hôtel Ivoire she lunches on "club sandwiches stuck together with nasty little cellophane-decorated toothpicks": the real Africa at last? "Probably," Isobel replies. "It's France too. And Portugal too and everything that's gone before." For her, Africa has remained a dream; she has not found in the Ivory Coast what she could not find in Ghana. "I know nothing about Africa," she tells Jimmie when she gets back, and to her it is a kind of defeat. Jimmie's reply, of course, is "That's a beginning." The snake again, with its tail in its mouth, the round trip from Ghana to Abidjan to Ghana; all that way to achieve a beginning.

Between beginnings there is one scene that lingers in the mind, in which Isobel and Mollie leave the Humanité. It poses a question that is central to the story and is never answered: '"Who are you?' a drunken young man had shouted at the doorman as we left the hotel. The doorman was barring the way. 'Who are you?'"

Isobel doesn't find out who she is in "Two in the Bush," but she is ready to, and so far readiness is all. She is like an athlete who, having trained all her life for the Olympics, now finds herself crouched at the starting line.

Between the crouch and the spring there is a pause (while the starter shouts, "On your marks . . . "), and the pause is a quiet, internal story called "Out in the Midday Sun". Apart from the obvious reference in the title to mad dogs and Englishmen, the phrase crops up again in a later African story, "Degrees": "Mary Lamb [not the Mary Lamb, of course, but Shakespeare is never very far away in Thomas's Africa; neither is the Mary who had a little Lamb, the miscarried Mary of Mrs. Blood ] and Norman ... stepped forward from under the shade of the airport roof and out into the midday sun." The midday sun is the opposite—the mirror image—of the heart of darkness: later Thomas will write with joy about "the relentless clarity of the African sun." And surely there is an echo here of Isak Dinesen's relentlessly clear-headed book, Out of Africa: "To Arabia and Africa, where the sun of the midday kills you, night is the time for traveling and enterprise." An echo is a kind of mirror.

The female narrator (again nameless, again Mary) of "Out in the Midday Sun" has written a short story, has sent it out under an assumed name (naturally, having no name of her own), and it has been accepted. She is terrified that her husband, also an unpublished writer, will leave her when he finds out. This is her new fear, or rather the old fear in a new guise:

Her fear had nothing to do with Africa. That was what she had known all along. Africa, like a dream, had simply provided the symbols. She had refused to recognize the reality behind them. She had to leave him. She loved him, but she had to leave him. It was as simple as that.

Which is, of course, romanticized nonsense, the soulful writer, wrist to forehead (perhaps wearing Sarah Bernhardt's Hamlet suit, en travestie), forever denied true love because of the curse of her penetrating insights. But the tail-eating snake has reappeared: the story to be published is "If One Green Bottle . . . ", about the miscarriage—and a more internalized, obfuscated, circumloquacious example of romanticism is difficult to imagine. Nothing is ever "as simple as that."

But "Out in the Midday Sun" (which also connects "mad dogs" with Thomas's Cheshire Cat introduction to Mrs. Blood) is a useful introduction to "Timbuktu", a fine story in which Thomas dovetails many of the feathery themes from her earlier pieces. The narrator of "Timbuktu" is Rona—an Old Norse name meaning "very powerful"—who, like the narrator of "Out in the Midday Sun", loves her husband but feels she has to leave him in order to discover her true self. Unlike her, however, Rona does leave her husband, if only for a while. Rona and Philip Hooper are living in Dakar, Senegal, where Philip is a cryptographer (like Poe and Graham Greene) with the U.N. Philip had been in Ghana before with "Wifie One" (Mary?) and a steward named Hyacinth, perhaps the same Hyacinth who bit the heads off chickens in "Rapunzel". The story of Rona begins inauspiciously enough with two logical impossibilities:

" . . . up the river to Timbuktu." For the past few minutes she had been doing a jellyfish float, head down and arms around her knees, bobbing just below the surfacewater, like a cork.

Taking the second sentence first, Rona is not dead despite having spent a few minutes just below the surface of the water: this is African water—not so much water as amneotic fluid. Rona is suspended in a kind of pre-natal sac ("jellyfish" is all right, "cork" is awful). She conceives, in this state, the idea of going to Timbuktu much as a fetus might conceive the idea of being born.

Second, "... up the river to Timbuktu" has a nice rhythm to it, a kind of boat rhythm, like Lowry's Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, but it is wrong nonetheless. The route to Timbuktu from Dakar is by train to Bamako and then by steamer, as Thomas says, "up the river to Timbuktu" (she repeats it like a mantra). If you think of the Niger as your right index finger, bent at both knuckles, then Bamako is the first knuckle, closest to the nail, and Timbuktu is the larger knuckle at the top. Timbuktu is therefore downriver. Rona doesn't really know where she is going. Which is why she never gets there.

Steaming up or down the Niger to a bend in the river recalls both Conrad (and "Timbuktu" is the most Conradian of Thomas's African stories) and Naipaul—mainly Conrad, though, because there is no politics in Thomas's Africa. For Rona, Africa is a mirror. As in Mark Twain, it is the river that lures her, as well as the romanticism invested in "the mysterious veiled kingdom of Timbuktu" at the end of it, the "new life. Without ties." The physical reality of river and city are something else again: who can remember what happens to Huck Finn when he reaches the mouth of the Mississippi? And for another American melding of Mark Twain and Conrad, see Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, for which Coppola made three equally unsatisfying endings. The most appropriate ending for the film is the unmade one in which the protagonist reaches the end of the river and there is nothing there. A Borgesian ending, in which everything and nothing meet and mate. No Kurtz (or rather no Brando), no horror. Conrad goes a step further: he puts Kurtz there and then removes him, a double absence. The final scene of "Heart of Darkness", in which Marlowe makes a mockery of everything Kurtz meant by putting his Intended's name in his dying mouth—better not to get to the end of the river at all. Coppola got us to the end of the river and left us with the horror. Thomas doesn't get us to the end of the river.

The other interesting thing about "Timbuktu" is that Thomas seems to have reverted in it to characters that belong more to her first African trip. Rona, like Mary, is married, living a kind of pre-natal existence in Africa—or rather in an English enclave within Africa. But like Isobel she is not afraid of Africa; she wants to become more like Africa, more a part of her surroundings, less like one of her white compatriots. "I don't feel real anymore," she tells Philip. "I don't feel as though I'm a separate person." think of the Niger as a birth canal, Timbuktu as a cervix. (The word Timbuktu has been translated as "old woman with large navel.")

In Bamako, Rona meets two opposing yet curiously complementary forces: P. J. Jones, an engineer who is also on his way to Timbuktu; and a family of B'hai missionaries from New Jersey, the Weavers. Opposed and complementary like Alice's Red Queen and White Queen: Jones is a realist—unlike Rona, Jones knows exactly why he is going to Timbuktu: to widen the airstrip; the Weavers are romantics. Jones calls them "naive and ill-informed and a general pain in the ass," but he admires their "romantic vision." Rona is a blend of the two forces. She is certainly romantic—the obsessive search for self, "too much Humphrey Bogart," as she says, and she is even mysteriously religious, almost literally born again: "I stood up in the water and heard this voice mention Timbuktu. All of a sudden, I knew that was where I wanted to go." And she too admires the Weavers: "B'hai. How exotic it sounded!

Like The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" But she is also realistic; like James she knows Africa (somewhat) and is comfortable in it, wears the right clothes, eats the right foods. Rona is as close as any of Thomas's characters ever come to achieving a synthesis of romanticism and realism, and acceptance of love and death, of the killing and cleansing African sun rising above the heart of darkness.

Thomas's African stories force one to think of them as a unit, as a long progression toward wholeness. They make, I think, three-quarters of a book of linked short stories. There are two very different personas in this imaginary book: the "Mary" of trip one and the "Isobel" of trip two. And they are melded finally into "Rona" of "Timbuktu", in much the same way as Rose and Janet in the first version of Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? were melded in the final version into a somewhat altered Rose. Thomas's ninth African story, "Degrees", is a further and less important reversion to the Mary of trip one, an expansion of a minor incident in Mrs. Blood—not exactly a recycling, but dangerously close to a retelling; certainly not a progression from "Timbuktu".

What is wanted now is the final quarter, the trip along the Niger (this time down the river), perhaps reaching Timbuktu to find it both the mysterious veiled city of Rona's dreams and the sordid, dusty, oblivious hole stirred by the barbed finger of V. S. Naipaul. Or perhaps she will not stop at Timbuktu, will continue as she hints in the story to the mouth of the Niger, and, like Huck Finn and Jim, sail into history, into her "other Self."