Night of Fire

A Victorian house somewhere near the sea, ruined over time, is burning down. Chapter by chapter, room by smoky room, Thubron’s remarkable novel journeys into the lives of the house’s six occupants, mining their pasts and the places they’ve traveled for answers to questions that have plagued mankind since Socrates. What is memory? Does it constitute one’s very self, or conquer death as something inherited, like a story? Looking through his telescope for wisdom, the landlord muses on the vastness of the stars. The priest, who no longer believes, relives a tragedy resulting from faith’s melancholy absence. The neurosurgeon, a coldhearted rationalist, is confronted by a patient who pleads with him not to erase her memories of a dead lover when extracting a tumor from her brain. The young naturalist, in love with butterflies, finds the infinite under a microscope. And the photographer searches for life’s essence in the portraits he takes. By the time we arrive at the luminous chapter devoted to the traveler, it is clear these restless tenants have more in common than we first imagined. All of them recognize, as the traveler does, that “an obscure rankling never quite died—as if there had, after all, been a destination that had eluded him.” (Jan.)