A carefully constructed person

The Americans come off the boat. They may come singly, or in couples or even in a threesome, but there is no safety in numbers, for their fate is sealed the moment they step down the gangplank. The Americans are innocent of course, but they are not very nice. As a rule in the world of Paul Bowles, they tend to be mean-spirited and tight-fisted, and there is also a kind of eerie blankness about them. They think of themselves — Porter Moresby in The Sheltering Sky for example — as travellers, not tourists, belonging no more to one place than another and moving slowly from one part of the earth to another, taking no account of time. Their aim is to be taken out of themselves as they press deeper into the Sahara or the Amazonian jungle, though these estranged, hollowed-out beings do not seem to have much self to be taken out of. They are looking for that one moment when like Nelson Dyar in Let It Come Down, scudding across the sea out of Tangier with a bundle of stolen currency, ‘he sniffed the wet air, and said to himself that at last he was living’. Kit Moresby leaves her husband’s corpse in the hospital and hitches a ride into the desert with a camel train and is ravished twice daily to her tingling pleasure by two impassive Bedouin chiefs. One way or another, these dissatisfied wanderers end up raped or insane, drugged or dead, or several of the above. In Up Above the World, Mrs Rainmantle, the garrulous lecturer to ladies’ clubs, is not only poisoned but set on fire. Their fate is both completion and come-uppance. For the natives who usually inflict these sticky ends, it is all in a day’s work. The natives are not innocent, but they are not very nice either.