Sunrise with Seamonsters Read Free

facetiousness and back-handed social climbing which, in Clive James's couplets, turn into fawning mockery, as he hitches his trundling wagon of assorted poetic styles to the Royal Coach in the hope of someone catching sight of his bumpy head and inefficient eyes, so he can wave hello in his own way...
    It went on in this way for eight more paragraphs.
    Another waspish review, far too long and far too cruel to quote, was the one I wrote of John Updike's
Rabbit Redux.
I read the book and wrote the review when I was in Indonesia, living among some of the poorest people I have ever seen in my life. This was on the fringes of Djakarta. In
my lap was the complacent Rabbit Angstrom and his hysterical wife and the sexual tangles that Mr Updike seemed to be insisting were serious problems; and out of the window—I could see them by glancing up—were people living in cardboard shelters, drinking black water and actually starving to death. To say that I took a dim view of Rabbit is an understatement; I said it was immoral and asinine. I am sure I overreacted, but I still think it is a silly book.
    I had my fill of reading bad books and giving damaging reviews. I decided that if a book was no good I did not want to read it, much less review it, and for the past eight years or so I have stuck to that. No one is sure whether reviews play much of a part in the selling of a book, and this uncertainty is a salutary thing—it has at least kept book reviewing honest. One of the happiest results of a book review I wrote was my receiving, a few years ago, a copy of the local newspaper of Wilton, Connecticut. Just under the paper's title, at the top of page one—where you might expect to find a quotation from Deuteronomy or one of Pudd'nhead Wilson's Maxims—was the line: "
I never knew a snob who was not also a damned liar"—Paul Theroux.
From a book review—bless them! I thought then, maybe someday I'll collect those reviews. But I have read them all. Some made me laugh, some made me cringe. What a lot of work! But they have served their purpose. There are none here.

    The past tense and reminiscing tone of this Introduction might make it seem as if in a fit of renunciation, the way you clean out a drawer, I have put it all behind me and given up writing pieces. But, no, I am still at it.
    P.T.
December, 1984

The Edge of the Great Rift
[September 1, 1964]
    There is a crack in the earth which extends from the Sea of Galilee to the coast of Mozambique, and I am living on the edge of it, in Nyasaland. This crack is the Great Rift Valley. It seems to be swallowing most of East Africa. In Nyasaland it is replacing the fishing villages, the flowers, and the anthills with a nearly bottomless lake, and it shows itself in rough escarpments and troughs up and down this huge continent. It is thought that this valley was torn amid great volcanic activity. The period of vulcanism has not ended in Africa. It shows itself not only in the Great Rift Valley itself, but in the people, burning, the lava of masses, the turbulence of the humans themselves who live in the Great Rift.
    My schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom there is a line of children, heads shaved like prisoners, muscles showing through their rags. They are waiting to peer through the tiny lens of a cheap microscope so they can see the cells in a flower petal.
    Later they will ask, "Is fire alive? Is water?"
    The children appear in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog-wisp. It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform, and the sky is everything else. It becomes Africa at noon when there are no clouds and the heat is like a blazing rug thrown over everything to suffocate and scorch.
    In the afternoon there are clouds, big ones, like war declared in the stratosphere. It starts to get gray as the children leave the school