SOURCE: Gooderham, Tim. “Flight Away from Danger.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4614 (6 September 1991): 21.

In the following review, Gooderham argues that Turning Back the Sun and Falling are both examples of how Thubron “is one of the current masters of the short novel.”

Colin Thubron's novels are concerned with emotional extremes; in Turning Back the Sun, his latest, he frames those extremes within the geographical and cultural oppositions which are familiar from his travel writing. Like its predecessor, Falling (1989), this book is pivoted on a difficult choice; though, here, the choice involves a flight away from danger and exhilaration rather than towards it.

The protagonist, Rayner, is a doctor who practises in an isolated town in an unspecified country with a colonial background. Marooned by residential restrictions, he remains isolated in a fragmented, backward community riven with prejudice and hypocrisy and wary of the “savages” who continue a nomadic existence...