Lewis, Evans writes, was ‘an escapist by reflex – arguably Norman’s management of that reflex is the dominant theme of his life.’ Like Emily Brontë and Truman Capote, he found life more natural in the anterooms of invention, and in his case such rooms were spread across continents. He could be depressive, and he relied on his writing powers to release him from that. At the centre of Evans’s biography is the mounting evidence of confusions that may have existed for years at the heart of Lewis’s abilities: whether or not he was reliable as a narrator of his own adventures, and why his fictional powers only reached full flourish when he wasn’t writing novels. Lewis was a great writer and like many great writers he was chiefly a performer, but always, with Lewis, the aesthetic extravagances serve the moral searchingness of the work. In that sense he was more like Graham Greene – with whom he shared a period and many destinations – than Bruce Chatwin, who might have learned from Lewis how to be a writer who is also a brilliant disappearing act.
Cape | hardback
792 pp. |ISBN:
9780224072755
