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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Jan 2017, 384 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2018, 384 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Zoë Fairtlough
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Award-winning, bestselling novelist and travel writer Colin Thubron returns to fiction with his first novel in more than a decade, a searing, poetic masterwork of memory.
A house is burning, threatening the existence of its six tenants—including a failed priest; a naturalist; a neurosurgeon; an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood; and their landlord, whose relationship to the tenants is both intimate and shadowy. At times, he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will also share their fate.
In Night of Fire, the passions and obsessions in a dying house loom and shift, from those of the hallucinating drug addict in the basement to the landlord training his rooftop telescope on the night skies. As the novel progresses, the tenants' diverse stories take us through an African refugee camp, Greek Orthodox monasteries, and the cremation grounds of India. Haunting the edges of their lives are memories. Will these remembrances be consumed forever by the flames? Or can they survive in some form?
Night of Fire is Colin Thubron's fictive masterpiece: a novel of exquisite beauty, philosophical depth, and lingering mystery that is a brilliant meditation on life itself.
1
Landlord
It began with a spark, an electrical break like the first murmur of a weakening heart that would soon unhinge the body, until its conflagration at last consumed the whole building. Years ago, at the end of the Victorian century, the house had been built in dignified isolation, but later developers split its storeys into separate flats, and the once-grand staircases now ascended past empty landings and closed doors. It was slipping into stately old age. Its balconies sagged behind their wrought-iron balustrades, and chunks of stucco pediment were dropping off on to the dustbins fifty feet below. The garden behind, which had once been the landlord's pride, lay half forgotten, and its shrubs – photinia, daphne, rosemary – burgeoned unclipped over the lawn.
Somewhere in the bowels of the building, behind a damp wall, a kink in a carbonised wire had become a tiny furnace. Down this half-blocked artery it travelled to a worn Bakelite socket, and the tenant asleep in ...
Memories, like butterflies, flutter throughout the pages, constantly reminding us of the brevity and ephemeral nature of our existence. Live your life. Love those around you. Be kind. This seems to be what Thubron is saying. He does so in a manner so elegant and poetic that if I could just read one book this year, I would absolutely pick this one...continued
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(Reviewed by Zoë Fairtlough).
Night of Fire frequently references butterflies, often ethereal, almost infinite in variation, and miraculous in their metamorphosis: "...the butterfly's resurrection was different: the winged angel risen from a worm...It showed that anything could become anything." It's as though Thubron wants to remind us time and again that we can change, we don't have to be worms.
The word butterfly literally means a fly that's attracted to butter. A German name, "milchdieb," means milk-thief. In places where ancient farming methods are still practiced, it's not uncommon to find butterflies hovering over buttermilk left to settle.
Here are but five of the many butterfly species that appear in the book:
Glasswings (Greta oto) are ethereal ...
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