Seeing Things
John Bayley
- The World, the World by Norman Lewis
Cape, 293 pp, £18.99, April 1996, ISBN 0 224 04234 3 - Omnibus: ‘A Dragon Apparent’, ‘Golden Earth’, ‘A Goddess in the Stones’ by Norman Lewis
Picador, 834 pp, £9.99, January 1996, ISBN 0 330 33780 7
The jacket photograph is revealing. A rather apologetic looking man, in sensible but unpretentious tropical attire, stands between two tremendously authentic indigenes, complete with bows and arrows and wearing only a curl of string round their penises. He looks like a sales rep, come to show them a new line in tupperware. But Norman Lewis has always maintained a low profile when it comes to exploring. His admirable series of travel books and travel novels, informative, neatly written, and full of a dry detached humour, make Lawrence of Arabia or Bruce Chatwin, even Wilfred Thesiger and Freya Stark, look like the most tremendous show-offs, auto-destructive as wildlife films on TV.
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Vol. 18 No. 14 · 18 July 1996 » John Bayley » Seeing Things (print version)
pages 17-18 | 2679 words