First published in the UK in 2002; published by Picador on February 25, 2014
A letter and a mysterious package arrive for Thomas Smith, an aging, long-married man living in South Africa. The letter forces unwanted memories to surface, memories of Tom's capture and imprisonment, first by Italians and then by Germans, while serving as an intelligence officer in the North Africa Campaign during World War II. That brief introductory scene is followed by a captivating examination of a man who is bound not just by the fences and razor wire of prison camps (bitter Edens policed by fallen angels), but by unwanted and uncontrollable emotions.
In the context of confinement, Bitter Eden centers on Tom's struggle to define love and to separate his love for another man from sexual desire. As grim days pass in the Italian camp, Tom reluctantly forms relationships with two men. One is a friendship with a mothering gay man named Douglas to whom he feels no attraction but comes to regard with affection. The other involves an attraction (and eventual devotion) to a married man named Danny who is (for much of the novel) hostile to openly gay men. Tom and Danny bond naturally, having both been victims of paternal abuse. Tom does his best to deny his feelings for Danny, or to define them as nonsexual, a challenging task when Danny sleeps next to him in a platonic but naked embrace. Jealousies are aroused and magnified when a gay artist paints Tom in the nude and when Tom begins to perform with the openly gay cast of the prison theater.
Bitter Eden deals with a subject that might discomfort some readers, but does so with sensitivity and compassion and gorgeously descriptive prose. Yet no reader should be made uncomfortable by a story that is ultimately about love, "an emotion too often threatened by ennui to attain to the grand passion for which I have long since ceased to hope." Tatamkhulu Afrika (who was, like Tom, a POW in Italy and Germany) vividly conveys the drudgery and deprivation and fear that pervades life in a prison camp, as well as the uncertain life that follows liberation, "the now's new ambiences, changed circumstances, grown alien strictures and codes." The story is dramatic and eventful but most of the events are small and the story's power resides in their accumulative impact on Tom. The extreme circumstances that give rise to Tom's self-examination raise profound questions about the nature of love and bonding under trying circumstances.
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