SOURCE: Thorpe, Michael. “Cast Out of Eden.” World and I 15, no. 3 (March 2000): 278.

In the following review, Thorpe discusses the narrative complexity of Pieces of Light.

Pieces of Light is an intriguing, finely spun mystery, most aptly entitled. Readers are led on a long journey of remembering, along shadowy paths resembling those in a tropical forest whose canopy occasionally admits bits and pieces of light. In subject matter, alternating between “darkest” Africa and an England that, to borrow the words of Conrad's narrator in Heart of Darkness, is also “one of the dark places of the earth,” it is sometimes obscure. However, although in his closing acknowledgments Thorpe names “certain books that have travelled with [him],” the reader need not turn to those. Doing so would only authenticate some of Thorpe's more arcane themes and allusions, not solve the mystery. Paramount among the novel's themes is that of human...