When the blind narrator, the masseur Louis Dunkel,
moves into the Cornwall country house of his patient
Mrs Nance, he becomes fascinated by her niece Sophie,
a haughty young woman. Their resulting romance,
however, is unsettled by the arrival of the blind, deaf
and dumb Amity Nance. The introspective Dunkel tries
to interpret and negotiate the pitfalls of a difficult and
at times hostile environment.
Written in a subtle, elegant prose which adroitly
embraces the impossibility of visual description,
The Blaze
of Noon, a rediscovered classic first published in 1939,
addresses issues of psychology and perception, whilst
pioneering, in the eyes of various critics, avant-garde
narrative techniques which were later adopted by the
Nouveau Roman school among others.
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'It will not date. It is written more like a novel one might
imagine being written in ten or even twenty years hence. We
may all be more European by then.'
Elizabeth Bowen
'An infallible resource to anyone writing a history of the interwar avant-garde.'
TLS
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