Books: Identical Twins, Uncommon Men

ON THE BLACK HILL by Bruce Chatwin; Viking; 249 pages; $14.75

With his first two books, English Author Bruce Chatwin revealed a flair for the exotic and unexpected. In Patagonia (1978) conducted a guided tour through a remote, forlorn region of South America. The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) took an imaginative leap in time and space back to the flourishing days of the West African slave trade. Given these performances and the critical praise they received, Chatwin’s third book (and second novel) seems more surprising still. On the Black Hill has nothing at all to do with wanderlust or faraway places; it is as firmly rooted to one spot as the geological formation in its title.

Lewis and Benjamin Jones are identical twins born in a farmhouse just on the border of England and Wales. The year of their coming is 1900. They are children of this century; yet their childhood could easily have transpired 300 years earlier. They measure their growth against the ageless progress of the seasons. Their father, a bad-tempered Welshman, rents a farm of 120 acres from the local squire. He expects his sons to pitch in when they are big enough. Their mother, a missionary’s daughter, wants them to go to school and better themselves.

The twins, for their part, are passive spectators at this struggle for their futures. They have discovered an uncanny self-sufficiency with each other. When a wasp stings one, the other feels pain and weeps. They infuriate their father by conversing in a private language. Lewis explains: “It’s the language of the angels. We were born with it.” Their adoring mother tries to discourage their odd sense of joint identity: “She bought them Sunday suits—gray tweed for Lewis and blue serge for Benjamin. They wore them for half an hour, then sneaked off and came back wearing each other’s jacket. They persisted in sharing everything. They even split their sandwiches in two, and swapped the halves.”

Chatwin interrupts this sibling harmony with England’s entry into World War 1. The farm is not big enough to warrant service exemptions for both of them. Their father explains to the local authorities “how his sons were not two persons, but one,” to no avail. Benjamin is inducted and hauled off to the nearest barracks: “A month later, certain warning signals told Lewis that the army had given up trying to train his brother, and was using force.” Benjamin’s “dishonorable discharge” spares the twins from physical injuries, but the word that both are slackers and shirkers informs the neighborhood against them. Neither can wander far from home without encountering taunts and jeers. By the time the war is over, “the twins’ world had contracted to a few square miles.”

And there it remains for the next 60 years and the last half of the novel. A narrative letdown, of sorts, might be expected at about this point in the story. Lewis and Benjamin seclude themselves specifically so that nothing unexpected or notable will happen to them. Yet their author shows how extraordinary such ordinary lives can seem. For one thing, the twins are at ease in a landscape of striking beauty and variety. Each year spring renews the earth around them: “Shreds of cloud hung motionless in the sky. The hills were silvery in the sunlight, the hedges white with hawthorn, and the buttercups spread a film of gold over the fields. The paddock was thick with bleating sheep.” As old men, Lewis and Benjamin follow the trails of their childhood: “Along the horizon, the hills were layered in lines of hazy blue; and they reflected how little had changed since they walked this way with their grandfather, over 70 years ago.”

The twins change no more than their surroundings. They remain steadfastly childlike. After their parents’ death, both sleep in their double bed, platonically, utterly innocent of Freud or of any sense of guilt or impropriety. Their naivete is secured through solitude. News of the outside world comes, if at all, as a whisper. The local paper headlines the huge salmon caught, after a three-hour struggle, in a nearby pool, and then mentions in passing: “Allies enter Berlin—Hitler dead in Bunker—Mussolini killed by Partisans.” News of atomic bombs over Japan a few months later gives the twins identical nightmares: “That their bed-curtains had caught fire, that their hair was on fire, and their heads burned down to smoldering stumps.”

Their dream is antipodal, embodying the horrors of all that they have been spared. And their story, as Chatwin constructs it, is an oblique commentary on the times of their lives. Posterity, should there be any, may well look back on this century as the time of displaced masses, victims of revolutions that threatened to set them free. The story of two brothers leading quiet lives in a changeless pocket of the world is a still point within the center of the chaos. Chatwin evokes a time of homelessness through the story of those lucky enough to stay home. —By Paul Gray