SOURCE: Montrose, David. “And If Thou Wilt, Remember.” Spectator 277, no. 8775 (21 September 1996): 54.

In the following review, Montrose argues that Distance is not as strong as Thubron's previous novel, A Cruel Madness.

The protagonists of Colin Thubron's more recent novels—A Cruel Madness (1984), Falling (1989), and Turning Back the Sun (1991)—were tormented by that ambivalent mixture, memory and desire. Each hankered after the irretrievable: a lost time, a lost woman. At the start of Distance, Thubron's narrator has lost even remembrance of such things. Edward Sanders, a 30-ish astronomer, emerges from a fugue state to find himself alone at a restaurant table in a town he does not recognise; his last two years are blank. The nearest hospital diagnoses retrograde amnesia caused by ‘something intolerable.’ Ascertaining the nature of that something provides the novel's mainspring.

As predicted, the missing pieces soon begin to return, earliest first, in erratic spurts, progressively drawing...