Colin Thubron’s compact, elegant and beautifully written new novel opens with a woman undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour. Kathleen has had a successful career as an actor and is married to Robert, a pompous neurologist with whom she is planning to go on holiday to Egypt. The operation stalls and so is postponed until their return from the Valley of the Kings.
This passage to Egypt, where Robert, in an ironic echo of E.M. Forster’s Adela Quested, hopes to see the ‘real’ country, is complicated by the inclusion of Robert’s younger brother, Alan. It was Alan who first met and fell in love with Kathleen when he was an adolescent, and he still nurses a passion for her, exacerbated both by the realisation that her illness may prove terminal and by her apparent attraction to their Egyptian guide, Ashraf. The trio are taken to Ashraf’s village to see a play he has written, which is at once the ancient story of a pharaoh’s vain bid for immortality and a satire on the present-day Egyptian regime. Tensions within the group lead to a desperate act of betrayal, as a result of which ‘the real Egypt’ brutally reasserts itself.
Kathleen has previously enjoyed an excursion into a tomb along a richly decorated underground passage. A bored and resentful Robert attributes his wife’s enthusiasm for what he describes as ‘these morbid and ridiculous images’ to her astrocytoma, whereas Alan ‘loves the fervour ignited in her by whatever it was she found resplendent in these indecipherable corridors’. If the hieroglyphs and images remain largely unreadable, this is unmistakably ‘a passage that would lead at last to death’, and the novel’s title reverberates throughout the book. As well as the trip from England to Egypt and this literal passage and what it represents, there is a preoccupation with the passage of time, which alters everything and is enacted by a group of black-veiled actors trooping across the stage in Ashraf’s play.
