[In the following review, Lawson criticizes Turning Back the Sun, calling the work “shallow” and “crude.”]

If you are fond of Colin Thubron, do not spoil it by reading this novel [Turning Back the Sun]. It has some dense, elliptical prose and some fertile imagery. But these fine patches only show up the rest as pedestrian and obvious.

The story concerns white men's ignorance and hostility, out in frontier country, towards native blacks. Rayner, our white hero, espouses the black cause. The moral crisis is illustrated by having Rayner and his childhood friend act out opposing parts. Thubron is looking at questions of the city versus the wilderness, and of the savage versus the civilised ethos. His savages, black and earth-connected, feel like Australian aboriginals. His terrain is lofty and unforgiving, like the Silk Road of China. There is, in addition, a love story.

Having set up his drama, Thubron finds his conclusion by bringing most of his strands together. These are reasonable novelistic conventions. But he fails to entice this reader with any scent of mystery.

His most successful character is the landscape, described with fluency and a wide but unshowy vocabulary. This is as true of the city as of the wilderness, and he moves easily between foreground and background. Daily changes are observed with subtlety and sophistication: “In different humours he found different towns here; a place of crude vigour, a town of blinkered pragmatism, a city of pure loss.”

The landscape, which has a changing and developing relationship with the other elements, achieves the status of a character. Since Homer also put nature in contrapuntal relation to the actions of men, Thubron is in good company. In contemporary fiction, landscape is often absent, but this writer's best imagery comes from the natural world.

He is good on reading faces as the map of an individual's life, especially with men, and especially with “savages.” He gives to the face what he gives to the mountain: affection. Faces and mountains are bigger than Rayner; their draft is deeper than this particular story.

But, savages and heroine apart, Rayner sees through everybody and hates them for the foolish choices of their lives. Thubron's characterisation is clumsily based on perfunctory psychoanalysis. His women are especially shallow. What a large number of breasts in this text: why are they always young or pert, smooth or tender? Zoë, his heroine, is forever feline, and arching herself about the place. His native girl's body is “lissome and coppery … her young breasts brushed against his wrists.” Rayner manages to be in awe of these cardboard women. This leaves Thubron looking only foolish.

The lack of compassion for his characters is unforgiveable. They feel like items of machinery, useful for moving the story forward. You simply groan when he gives his hero an appointment with a psychoanalyst, as a device for bringing in his parental history.

Thubron, who has spent years travelling the world, chooses a story that is all common denominator. It is plausible in the way of a TV soap opera, and similarly crude. Where is the particularity, the urgency of this one story? Make up any kind of town you like. If you are García Márquez, say, you call it Macondo, and it is more lifelike than any town you can find in the atlas.

But this novel is nothing but an outline. Only here and there does some oasis of cleverness glint from the endless bluff of rock. As a novel it is serviceable—but only just. When you are Colin Thubron, with ten books (including four novels) behind you, that is not enough. Not nearly.