‘Passage’ by Colin Thubron

It is a decade or two now since I read one of Colin Thubron’s remarkable travel books describing his long journeys across Russia and Asia. I knew that he also writes novels, but this is the first one I have read. Published this summer, it is short – just 135 pages – highly original and quite unlike anything I have read for some time. It also contains some descriptive passages that, with only a slight change of emphasis, he could equally well have inserted into one of his travel books, because much of the action takes place during a holiday in Egypt.

The story opens with the central character, a forty-seven-year-old actress called Kathleen, lying in a hospital operating theatre. She has a brain tumour located close to her hippocampus, the part of the brain most closely involved in memory, and a surgeon is attempting to remove it. Because brain tissue does not contain pain receptors, and because the doctors continually need to assess whether important functions are being affected by what they are doing, Kathleen remains awake during the procedure. She is shown pictures to identify and asked questions requiring her to recall facts about her life as the operation proceeds. This makes for a striking and fascinating opening.

At the end of the novel, a few months on, she has a further operation on her brain. In between, she takes a holiday to Egypt, visiting Cairo and the Valley of the Kings with her husband, about whom she is no longer quite as enthusiastic as she once was, and his brother, with whom she had enjoyed a teenage flirtation thirty years before.

Egypt is, of course, an inspired setting for all this. Kathleen is confronting the possibility not simply of death but of losing the memories that constitute much of her sense of who she is, while travelling through a civilisation famously preoccupied with preserving identity beyond death. Tombs, mummies and the elaborate preparations made for passage into another world consequently provide an appropriate metaphor for what is happening inside Kathleen’s own head.

The romantic entanglements are not simply there to provide plot either. In a novel concerned with memory, Kathleen is travelling with both the man with whom she has built a life and another who represents a road not taken thirty years earlier. Past and present consequently become rather difficult to disentangle. The little love triangle that has been set up to keep the pages turning then becomes a quadrangle when an Egyptian guide takes a shine to Kathleen too. It is all very elegantly done.

This middle section is also a beautifully written slice of travelogue. Colin Thubron’s travel-writer’s eye remains wonderfully alert to landscape, architecture, history and the small details of encounters with people. We find out quite a lot about the sights, sounds, culture, history and contemporary politics of Egypt as the narrative unfolds.

We then return to the UK for the denouement as Kathleen once again has to have her head clamped firmly in place and is required to answer questions while a surgeon digs about inside her brain:

Behind her the surgeon is delving into her opened brain. So long as she speaks he may be touching something malignant, she remembers, but the tissue critical for language creates silence. She knows too that remembrance can vanish. Her nausea starts to lift. And as the psychologist’s questions continue, her mind reels back to find memories that may be imperilled or already gone. She wonders if she is recalling – faces, voices, loves – for the last time. She concentrates on what may be happening. Which each response she pleads silently, fiercely: don’t extract living tissue. This is mine. Me.

The book’s title becomes increasingly apt as the story unfolds. There are physical passages – from England to Egypt and through the Egyptian landscape – but also passages through memory and time, and hovering behind everything are thoughts about the ultimate passage from life into death. The book raises the unsettling question of how much of our identity resides in our memories and what remains of us if those memories begin to disappear.

This is an accomplished and rich novel. In just 135 pages Colin Thubron manages to say a great deal about memory, ageing, love, regret and the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between our physical brains and our sense of ourselves. At the same time he gives us a suitably evocative journey through parts of Egypt.

I am sure this one will stay with me for a long time.