Forests Of The Night

by Sarah Harrison

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Genres: Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 1992

Reviews

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisitely constructed tale of mystery and revenge, a story that begins in 1929 at an exclusive boys' boarding school when three lives collide in a moment of ugliness and jealousy and confused adolescent sexuality. The story resumes after the fall of Burma, in the Changi prison camp and on the long march to the infamous Thai-Burmese railroad, and finally concludes decades later after a chance encounter on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Three men - the wealthy Butler, the weak Oliphant and Maitland the gardener's boy, endure appalling suffering at the hands of their Japanese captors. Hundreds of men die around them while they are caught up in their own strange triangle of need and hate.

This is extremely well-written, particularly the first-person present-day sections as the unidentified narrator expresses his own archly ironic distance from his pilgrimage through the Far East. The psychological tensions of the principal personalities is set against the epic scale of the horror and violence, the needless cruelty and apparently endless physical suffering. None of the characters are particularly likeable, but the personal drama they are caught in is utterly compelling while the wider human drama is flabbergasting.

I don't know much about the author, but to judge by the listings at the back of my 1991 edition paperback she had written two historical romances and two bawdy comedies, so this looks atypical. I wonder if she wrote any more like this? I wonder of her other work is as acutely, savagely brilliant as this?

[Cecile · Rating 2 out of 5]

How depressing. All the characters are more or less dislikeable. Not worth reading. The most interesting thing about it is that is odd that a woman wrote it. It has a brittle texture to it that one finds often in this kind of fiction written by men. I know this is sexist- an observation rather than a criticism.