It's a commonplace about travel writing that it ultimately reveals more about the traveller's psychology than the locales they travel in. Well, guess what: it's a commonplace because it's often true! Which is my way of saying, I guess, that The Sheltering Sky not really being "about" Northern Africa and being incurious about its natives isn't really (at least at first) a fault or "the point"--it's about these odd Americans and their compulsions.

Right at the start, you get kicked into a trio: Port and his wife Kit, who have been travelling together for years and are in an uneasy romance, and then Tunner, a compulsively friendly, sunny guy attached to them like a lamprey. One mark of Bowles' artistic intelligence is that even though this could have easily been made formulaic, this dynamic is rendered realistically with sympathy for all participants, who each have some signal virtue and are each in some kind of battle with their dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction--especially Port's--is also what motors them and us through the greater part of this book, ever deeper into Africa.

As for this Africa, though it doesn't need to be the "real" Africa, it certainly does play an absolutely crucial role. As given to us in the dry, elegant writing, it's a kind of sensory deprivation landscape, a place where by degrees more and more elements of ordinary life are removed and the physiological effects on these three Westerners (and us!) are observed. One of these elements is the hum-and-thrum of social life. In its absence, the pleasures and frustrations of sociality are felt more intensely: how irritating to be at the edge of the Western world and still have some fucking asshole hitting you up for a lunch date! Another element is just plain physical comfort. This book is a cook's tour of discomfort and exhaustion--heat, sand, bad food, bad smells, crowding together, the pain of illness--that we nevertheless receive with pleasure, like the pains of an inititation ritual.

I have to admit that the third part felt for me like a major step down from the first and second, and here I think I'll have to bring back the Orientalism piece. Avoiding spoilers, while the first two-thirds are a voyage into deeper and deeper solitude, culminating with a psychedelic-horrific reduction to one's own body (no wonder the Beats loved this book), the last third seems to want to continue the story on through to some "other side" represented by untouched Northern African society. The way this is done feels very fantastical, and probably couldn't have been otherwise, since radical Otherness is something that loses its force when you're not just feeling the edge of it or dipping in for a burning, evocative instant (Colonel Kurtz: "The horror! The horror!") but are supposed to be immersed in, in which case it fades (at least in this book) into cartoonishness: the fantasy that's just fantasy instead of the fantasy that's True.