“There it stood again, the magnificent marmalade bird! Head and shoulders above the grovelling tabibs, peppered as a thrush, beaked as an ibis, and achieving even some of the important trousery strut of an eagle.”
An amazing story of a marriage battle as Dr Henry Livingstone and his wife holiday in Morocco, somehow in tune with this ‘Temporary Matter’ here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2022/08/06/a-temporary-matter-jhumpa-lahiri/ that I read and reviewed only this morning, where darknesses and secrets are replaced by breeds of birds in this Sansom story, with the kaleidoscopic genius-loci of Morocco last century coming right at you with the wife’s pesky small tabibs and the husband’s more regal marmalade bird that attacks their marmalade in the hotel, and she attacks the marmalade itself with Kleenex tissue, and this sticks to the marmalade bird itself, paralleling their battles of what a holiday should be in Morocco, spiritual and Moroccan, or trivial and touristy. It is like an Aickman with knowingly pretentious literariness, and we are bombarded sensorily by it, as they bombard each other censoriously. Till they sort of make it up via their respective competing and struggling birds and become a gestalt more than what they are individually, along with sacrifice and exultation. Like Elizabeth Bowen, too.
I felt like picking old hard skin off my ageing head while reading it. And so I did.
“…and a tall Sengalese in baggy scarlet trousers and gold waistcoat entered the room carrying letters on a tray. This man stood for a moment more astonished by humans than by bird: by the doctor’s malevolent bloodhound eye and ghostly face patched with white toothpaste, by the wife with hair pinned mannishly down in a night-net. But his second thought, as servant and by nationality host to these strangers from the white North, was to be of assistance to the poor crazed things.”
***
Full context of this story: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/1366-2/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
No comments yet.