'On the Black Hill' experiments with themes [Chatwin] has made his own as a travel writer—the improbable and bizarre completeness of worlds on the margins of consciousness, and the ready-made fiction you can find, if you look, in the accidents of history and geography. 'On the Black Hill' surveys twentieth-century life from the vantage-point of a small mountain in Radnorshire, where time arranges itself in slow layers, and you can observe the frenzy of large events through the wrong end of the telescope.

Eccentricity is the order of things, and the book's beginning, describing the curious, crotchety routines of twin bachelor brothers perched on their hill … has the same sort of imaginative effrontery as the opening of Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast.' You're plunged into a pattern of life that refers only to itself.

Chatwin, unlike Peake, is interested in the way his characters' insulated and conventionally crazy...