The care and delicacy of Damon Galgut's muffled yet extraordinary In a Strange Room call to mind the works of other great solo travelers: Bruce Chatwin (The Songlines
, In Patagonia
), Patrick Leigh Fermor (A Time of Gifts), and Rory Stewart (The Places In Between
). Like those nonfiction classics, the first of this novel's three pieces, "The Follower," lovingly details a difficult long walk. And like Chatwin and Stewart, Galgut's "Damon" remains isolated regardless of whom he's with. On an earlier hike in the African bush he meets a handsome, domineering German called Reiner who, after a brief exchange in the wild, asks the manager back at the otherwise empty hostel to put him in Damon's room, to Damon's confused surprise on his return. The sexual tension mounts, unfulfilled. Two years later Reiner returns to hike Lesotho with him:
They do not talk. There is, yes, occasional conversation, but about practical things, where will we sleep, should we have a rest, otherwise they walk, sometimes next to each other, sometimes apart, but always alone. It's strange that all this space, unconfined by artificial limits as it spills to the horizon, should throw you back so completely into yourself, but it does, I don't know when I was last so intensely concentrated into a single point, see me walking on that dust road with my face washed clean of all the usual emotions, the strains and strivings to link up with the world.
This time the tension is worse, wearing on the men until one of them breaks. The emotional aftermath is more poignant than the eruption.
The book's high point is its second section, "The Lover," which won a National Magazine Award and was a PEN/O Henry story this year. Again, Damon's separateness is key:
He takes the overnight train to Victoria Falls. He lies in his bunk, hearing the breathing of strangers stacked above and below him, and through the window sees villages and sidings flow in and out of the dark, the outlines of people and cattle and leaves stamped in silhouette against the lonely light, then flowing backward again, out of sight into the past. Why is he happiest in moments like these, the watcher hiding in the dark. He doesn't want the sun to rise or this particular journey to end.
On a trip through Tanzania, Malawi, and Kenya, Damon meets a man his age on holiday with the much younger Jerome who "has from up close a beauty that is almost shocking, red lips and high cheekbones and a long fringe of hair" and Jerome's sister Alice. Again the yearning romance is thwarted by restraint and hesitation, until Damon decides to make an impulsive trip to see Jerome in Switzerland where that fringe of hair has been shorn for his compulsive military service. Underneath, nothing has changed.
The final section, "The Guardian," is an arresting change, describing Damon's trip to India with a selfish, self-destructive lesbian/bi woman named Anna. For any reader who dreamed of less indecision and more action in the first two pieces, Anna is a nightmare come true. Yet it's her terrible drama that finally brings forth an English widow's catharsis, through the act of telling her story, then later, remembering it causes Damon's catharsis. Story/telling and story/travelling unify the book, as when earlier Damon thinks, "The story of Jerome is one he's lived through before, it is the story of what never happened, the story of travelling a long way while standing still." Later he thinks, "A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made." But as great literature attests, it's the telling that endures.
In a Strange Room is the second of Galgut's novels to be shortlisted for the Booker. His first, The Good Doctor, which also explores the tensions of straight male friendships, is more traditional and accessible. This one is more daring, elusive yet deeper, and better.
Damon Galgut tours tonight at 192 Books, tomorrow night at Three Lives, and this weekend at the Miami Book Fair.