The Gravity of Sunlight

Rosa Shand

Excerpt: "Night drops unexpectedly. Butterflies fold up. Birds hush. Colors drain from jacaranda groves and then you don't see jacaranda groves. The wall of insect screech begins to rise. Out of town the black is seamless. If it's a moonless night your headlights are the one pinprick, and the beams dwindle, leave the weight of darkness. You sense the flimsiness of manmade things. Your words space out, stop altogether. You go still, listen, strain to catch what's there. You tense to hear the motor, use the force of all your will to keep it turning over."

Rosa Shand's first book is filled with simple but beautiful language, description of the physical and the emotional experience of living in Uganda during the time right before and during Idi Amin's political coup. Every chapter opens with a passage like the one above, which is set off from the rest of the text. As the story unfolds, Shand manages to very gently capture the very complicated relationships between husband and wife, wife and lover, amidst the rhythms of life in a foreign land, all which help make this a very successful debut novel.

Agnes is our narrator, and she, her husband John and their young children have moved to Uganda. John is a professor teaching at the college; Agnes teaches part-time at the lower school. Each of them is lost in their respective idealisms, and their relationship is suffering for it, as they don't seem to have an intimate connection on any real level. Agnes, who is always searching to fulfill what she feels is a lack of meaningful attachment to her husband, meets Wulf, who is also teaching at the university, and is a friend of her husband's, they embark on a tentative relationship.

What works about this novel, is that this affair, in all its various stages and with all its various consequences, is written in a way that echoes the lifestyle and the political uncertainties of the country. Shand weaves Agnes' story with an intimate look at a society very different from Agnes'and our own, and these dual storylines are revealed piece by piece to the reader as the circumstances of Agnes' daily life allows. She uses deceptively simple language to tell a story of many layers, each one as lush and as precarious as the next. A fine book to curl up with on a long winter weekend, which is about how long it will take to read.