Sillitoe has specialized in heroes set apart from their fellow men
ever since the prize-winning The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner. This time it is a blind man, Howard, an ex-RAF radio
operator who was blinded in the last war. He brightens his
restricted life by listening to and decoding morse code messages
from all over the world, while his beautiful wife Laura worries
over and cares for him. A chance meeting brings him in touch with a
shady villain called Richard and ultimately an international drugs
racket which changes his mundane life for ever. He takes to the
high seas and faces extreme danger in pursuit of both drug
smugglers and a lady whose voice has intrigued him on the air.
Sillitoe's writing is as vigorous and penetrating as it was in the
50s: his blind hero and the noble tender wife are wonderfully well
observed. Life aboard the luxury yacht used for smuggling is as
memorable as parts of Treasure Island. Treachery and a passionate
love affair form the basis of a story that starts low key but
develops into a nail-biting drama. One of this fine novelist's
best. (Kirkus UK)
Blind Howard, an ex-RAF veteran, possesses an acute sense of awareness, and can see almost better than the sighted. Morse code patterns his universe and keeps his mind turned to the big and sometimes bad world. Noble Laura, his doting wife, is loveliness personified.
Then Howard becomes acquainted with the nefarious Richard, and soon the idyll of his life with Laura starts to crack. Morse is the common denominator in the alliance. But before long, Howard and his world of dots and dashes, dits and dahs, takes on new darker horizons when he clicks into a drugs racket. Howard, the code-breaker, becomes Howard the buccaneer. He leaves lovely Laura for a wild voyage in search of a woman whose voice he has fallen in love with; and a sea-journey with maverick sailors on a heroin heist.
"There is so much to enjoy and commend in the novel. Sillitoe inhabits Howard's unseeing world with absolute conviction, providing a wealth of telling detail about a blind person's skilful negotiation of his everyday surroundings. Properly gripping."
SUNDAY TIMES
"Audacious and adventurous. The novel has all Sillitoe's characteristic virtues. He combines an exemplary craftsmanship with warmth, humour and sympathy. He has the great merit of always seeming to know where his characters are, what they are doing and thinking, when they are not on the page. And he is a compelling storyteller. He makes the fashionable novels of the generation that succeeded his – Amis junior, McEwan, Barnes, Rushdie – look flimsy, all more concerned with showing-off, peacock style, than with telling it how it is."
ALLAN MASSIE, 'The Scotsman'
"Sillitoe still effectively portrays the psychological idiosyncrasies of British reserve with chilling detail and a tender appreciation for obsessive loners."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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