"The Sheltering Sky" (Paul Bowles, 1949)

I spent a year in Morocco, travelling to almost every dusty corner of that country with my friends James and Daniel.

We explored Casablanca and Marrakech and Essouera and Chefchouen, and countless, nameless, hills and valleys and towns and villages in between.

We traveled by bus, train, and bush taxi, and by hitch hiking, and we made friends in every place we visited.

As a result of all that I feel like Morocco is one of the few foreign places where I have truly gotten to the point where I felt ‘at home.

It’s a beautiful country with incredibly hospitable, generous people and I love it a lot.

So, I admit to possessing a somewhat snobby attitude sometimes, when I’m watching a movie or reading a book, that is set in El Maghreb.

It’s sort of an ‘I know Morocco better than they do” sort of attitude, and I’m pretty embarrassed about it.

But when I was reading Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky,” I had to just sit back in wonder and accept that this guy lives and breathes Morocco and knows the country and the people, inside and out.

TSS is a perfect example of Bowles' ability to take his readers under the skin of this foreign land, to experience the country from an insider’s point of view.

The book begins with three Americans disembarking from a freight ship on a jetty in a grubby North African port town in 1947.

The trio is comprised of a married couple, Kit and Port Moresby, and their friend Tunner. They’re rich, cocky, artsy Americans out to see North Africa -- living up to many of the negative stereotypes that still follow American tourists around the world.

Bowles immediately sets the scene, accurately describing a place that smacks first-timers upside the head with a blast of dust and heat and foreign smells and languages that can be completely disorienting.

It quickly becomes clear that there is a strange dynamic between the three. Kit is feminine and fragile and sensitive, but with a deep rooted fear and insecurity that can result in a mean edge.

Port, her husband, is arrogant, smart, driven – and with little ability to see beyond his own personal goals.

Tunner is shallow and dull, but incredibly handsome and charming, and mostly he’s just along for the ride.

Port is the driving force behind their journey. He insists he is a “traveler not a tourist” and believes tourists take trips, while travelers slowly migrate from one part of the world to another, over a period of years. I like that concept.

The book, which has been adapted to film by Bernardo Bertolucci (starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger), is both a literal journey into the fabric of Morocco and its people, and an exploration of the minds of Americans who find themselves dealing with difficult circumstances in extremely foreign lands.

Bowles follows the characters as they take their very American style of travel – full wardrobes and bottles of champagne and massive stacks of luggage, further and further south into Morocco and away from European influence. The quality of their hotels declines the further they go, the pool of people who speak French, evaporates, the sand flies increase, and their adventure quickly becomes much rougher than expected.

When Port and Kit finally split from Tunner, in order to have some quality time, the situation really begins to decline as Port becomes sick with Typhoid, and as Kit begins to unravel psychologically as her two anchors, Tunner and Port, no longer give her something to grip on to.

From there the story begins to really get interesting as it takes a massively unexpected turn, deep in the Sahara desert, as Kit becomes completely unhinged as her inability to understand or adapt to her circumstances, drives her to the edge.

I wish I could say more about this without giving away the plot, except to say that through her experience we begin to see an entirely different viewpoint of Morocco and its people.

The physical journey this book takes captures accurately the beauty, immensity, and diversity of the Sahara – the shifting colours, deceptive gentleness, and shocking power. I can only imagine there is accuracy too, in the way Bowles describes the journey right to the edge of madness, brought on my helplessness and instability in a land that could swallow a person completely – and in this case, does.

Like most of what I’ve read by Bowles, TSS is undeniably dark and disturbing, but mixed with that is an honest appreciation for beauty and culture and that fascinating clash that occurs when very different people, from very different worlds, come together.