ANNE DUCHÊNE

[On the Black Hill] disconcerts expectation; something one imagines by now this author very much enjoys doing. After the harshly and brilliantly exotic expanses of In Patagonia and The Viceroy of Ouidah, [Chatwin] has elected to study a few square miles of hill-farm in Radnorshire, and the lives of the twin brothers who farm it.

The writing has the emblematic self-sufficiency of the late David Garnett's. The sense of place is flawlessly invoked, usually in paragraphs of only a few lines …; but the necessary presence of the practical is never neglected….

The mixture of the possible and the unlikely with the laconically lyrical is very much in David Garnett's peculiar vein. So is the humour, which gets in everywhere …; and so is the author's amusing himself by pretending to be a loyal slave of the accidental, while in fact he is magisterially pulling all the strings. Anyone who enjoyed being bullied in this way by Garnett will enjoy this book too.

Benjamin and Lewis, the brothers, who are identical twins, are shown over a period of eighty years sharing their work, and also their bed, noncommittally, and sharing each other's pains when the other is in danger or distress; Lewis's nose bleeds too when Benjamin, rejected in 1914 as a conscientious objector, is beaten up in the Army.

They do not invariably share each other's pleasures—Lewis several times broaches relationships, always abortive, with women—but often they do, as when their mother gives them each a Hercules bicycle on their thirty-seventh birthday, on which they make archaeological forays into Wales. Unhappily rebuffed in these, they keep the more closely to their farm—which is called The Vision, as if challenging reviewers to make too much of the fact—but they never become recluses; their friends include members of the local gentry, the local hippie, and numerous crumbling neighbours, chiefly female, who are often difficult to distinguish under the caked grime and dung.

The book is "about" such concrete, arbitrary details as those suggested here. It may give a fine insight into the feuding and tolerance of a small community, and even a series of incidental comments on British social history in this century, but these are certainly not its motives. Its intention is to paint a picture of two men's lives in a particular place. What happens is not really the author's business, Chatwin implies. Love may occur, or violence, or sadness, but his concern is to show the continued existence of the brothers in their parents' house. Sentiment is always checked, anticipation always baffled, by events…. The charitable, if slightly distended eye suspends judgment, and Radnorshire is seen as every bit as full of banked-down human madness as Patagonia. Where on earth, one wonders, will Bruce Chatwin go next?