Thursday, August 1, 2019

The Enigma of Arrival (1987)



V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987) takes place in Sussex, not far from Stonehenge, where Hardy's Tess and Angel Clare came to rest -- before her arrest.

I saw him as a remnant. Not far away, among the ancient barrows and tumuli, were the firing ranges and the army training grounds of Salisbury Plain. There was a story that because of the absence of  people in those military areas, because of the purely military uses to which the land had been put to for so long, and contrary to what one might expect after the explosions and mock warfare, there survived on the Plain some kinds of butterfly that had vanished in more populated parts. And I thought that in some such fashion, in the wide droveway at the bottom of the valley, accidentally preserved from people, traffic and the military, Jack like the butterflies had survived.

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