Land Without Echoes, by John Hopkins
Land Without Echoes By John Hopkins Zuleika £13.99
Some older writers who go on writing for the sake of it produce mediocre books; others can produce a tour de force well into old age.
One of the latter group is John Hopkins, now over 80, with his new novel, Land Without Echoes. I first came across Hopkins’s work back in the 1960s when our novels appeared on the same publisher’s list. I was impressed because he lived in Tangier and mixed with his fellow expatriate Americans, Paul Bowles and William Burroughs: at the time Burroughs was my literary hero.
Thereafter, Hopkins’s literary output was not prolific: four more novels and three volumes of diaries – the most recent, The White Nile Diaries, an engaging description of how, after a spell reading to the blind Percy Lubbock in Italy, he and a friend rode a BMW motorbike from Italy to Uganda.
Land Without Echoes also describes a journey, but of a different kind. An American girl, Daisy Adams, arrives with her mother in Tangier on a boat from Barcelona. They have come in search of Daisy’s brother, Arturo, who, having enlisted in the American army, volunteered for a peace-keeping force in Morocco, later deserted and has now disappeared. The brother and sister have had a tough, outdoor upbringing, first in Arizona, then in Spain. Mrs Adams is ‘a tall, brown-skinned American lady, with a mane of hair dyed jet black, and a bosom men stared at’. Daisy ‘had inherited her mother’s complexion and, from a distance, you might have guessed she was a Spanish or Arab boy. Even close up, her sex was difficult to determine.’
Daisy is not just the heroine but the substance of the novel. There are some short chapters describing what happens to Arturo, but they are essentially to explain why Daisy’s quest for her brother is fruitless. She speaks some Arabic, and has sufficient feminine allure to persuade influential men to help her: ‘The carefree impetuosity of her kiss, the odour of her perfume, and especially the pliant strength of her embrace sent a tremor of delight through the old man.’
Young men are another matter. ‘One thing about Tangier bothered Daisy, and it bothered her a lot. Whenever she went out, she was pestered by Moroccan young men.’ Daisy therefore trims her hair, changes into her brother’s clothes, brought by her mother to Tangier, and passes herself off as a man.
Daisy’s mother dies; Daisy’s stepfather arrives to bury her and gives Daisy a Ruger revolver. There are deft references to Daisy’s childhood in Arizona. The stepfather was brutal. There were scandals. Daisy had a baby. They then left for Spain.
Alone now in Morocco, and suffering from asthma, Daisy sets off with a horse and a dog to reach the dry air of the Sahara on the other side of the Atlas Mountains. With great artistry, Hopkins conveys much with few words – whether it be the landscape or the people Daisy encounters. She falls in love and marries the orderly of an American general; she converts to Islam and befriends a tribal leader, the Marabout. She is raped; her money is stolen, but she is saved by a French duchess who commissions her to find her husband, abducted and now lost in the Sahara.
In each of the short chapters of Land Without Echoes, the narrative is lucid, rich but never cloying – the detail arresting, the words carefully chosen. As Daisy becomes obsessed by the desert, so do Hopkins’s readers. It is a great accomplishment to create in Daisy a character who is at once admirable, lovable and tiresome – a kind of hippie Isabel Archer – and, through her, to portray so thoroughly and so successfully a country and a culture.
Daisy falls in love with the desert; so do we.