Those who have read Mr. Bowles's short stories will know that his domain is one of nihilism and terror. In The Sheltering Sky, his first novel, he has extended this Saharan territory of the unknown to encompass, without the loss of tension, a series of incidents whose grotesqueness and futility reach almost beyond plausible limits. Almost, but not quite. For Mr. Bowles has conjured out of the bizarre interior journey made in the Sahara by an American couple whose marriage has gone off the boil, a series of remarkable episodes, each of which, though increasingly macabre and pointless, still retains some kind of hallucinatory logic. It is possibly only the logic of the horrifyingly absurd, of that realm where sexual frustration acquires a garish fulfilment. But it is an intense logic in which passion, jealousy, indifference, rape and lunacy follow one another with a kind of ritual compulsion...