Bruce Palling
The World, The World
Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis
By Julian Evans
Jonathan Cape 725pp £25 order from our bookshop
Norman Lewis only just scraped into The Oxford Companion to English Literature in his tenth decade, three years before his death in 2003. Even then, it was the briefest of entries, naming merely two of his travel classics, published nearly half a century earlier. It was as if Britain’s literary establishment didn’t quite see the point of him or even approve of his oeuvre. The title of Julian Evans’s exhaustive and sympathetic biography sums up Norman Lewis’s problem – he never did break out from being an author revered by a discriminating minority to one, like Bruce Chatwin or Paul Theroux, with a wider audience. It was erroneously assumed by many that Lewis was a mere travel writer rather than a master of description and atmosphere. How blinkered they were. The genius of Lewis is in his ability to evoke the surreal nature of many aspects of people’s lives without belittling or patronising them.
It is true, though, that by the 1970s he was virtually unknown except for his magazine journalism, with his earlier South East Asian volumes well out of print. He still had a faithful if small following. A Dragon Apparent was the first book
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw