Word: deserts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...power plant that is as unreliable as the loyalty of the natives. The Italians still remaining are despised by their British successors, who are themselves aware that service in such a post is proof of their personal failure. The natives live in age-old ignorance and squalor, the desert villages are outposts of pure savagery, and the rabble-rousing nationalists are free to work their political magic...
There is order in Belele and the surrounding desert because Major de Goltz creates it through simple brutality. His command is a native Mule Company of blacks, whom he keeps in line with regular floggings. In all the district his word is law, and since he is close to seven feet tall and can break a man's jaw with a swipe of his fist, he never gets any back talk. Others may want to leave Belele for a more civilized post, but not de Goltz. Half Dutch, half native, he knows that he has reached his peak...
...administrative misfits and the cheap little ploys of petty, ambitious men in seats of power. Most of all, he can catch the hatred of mistreated natives in a brief scene, show on a single page the vast gulf of misunderstanding that separates insensitive whites and long-suffering blacks. His desert comes powerfully alive in brief, sharp descriptions, and without leaving his brutal, well-plotted story for a moment he makes his grim but debatable point with clarity: if Africa is lost to the West, it is because stupidity and brutality have been the means employed to keep...
...contentious missionary, he got into trouble throughout the Middle East. Kurdish tribesmen loaded him with chains and bastinadoed him; in Khorasan he was flogged, in Afghanistan nearly burned alive. Wolff was also shipwrecked, poisoned, stung half to death by wasps, and three times stripped naked in the desert and left...
Like the other books of Durrell's Alexandrian cycle, Mountolive has vivid imagery (the impact of the desert night is like "the flutter of eyelashes against the mind") and penetrant thought (no such thing as art exists for artists and the public; "it only exists for critics and those who live in the forebrain"). The book also has scenes of ghastly hilarity, as when Mountolive stumbles inadvertently into a brothel of child prostitutes and nearly loses his reason as well as his wallet...