'The Dark of Summer' by Eric Linklater - 4.5*

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

[9/10]

With only 46 ratings and six reviews, this novel qualifies as one of the most underrated hidden gems on Goodreads. I don't know who among my friends I have to thank for pointing it out to me, but I hope a truck load of kharma is sent their way.

Anthony Burgess called it ‘His masterpiece, and one of the finest novels of the century, in the same class as Waugh’s Sword of Honour.’ For me, for the elegant use of language, for the authority of the eye-witness and for the careful examination of morality, the names of Joseph Conrad [actually mentioned in the story in relation to the main character] and of Anthony Powell are closer to the mark.

I have almost four pages of notes, of ideas i would like to touch upon, of examples of the evocative writing style, but I'm leaving on vacation in a couple of hours and very short on time. Hopefully, I can get back to my review when I come back home. I'll just leave a couple of quotes from the prologue as a teaser

Where I shall live when I retire – where I am living now, on leave from the great watershed – there is, at the top of summer, no darkness at midnight. The day puts on a veil, the light is screened, and a landscape that, in fine weather, appears at noon to be almost infinite – in which long roads and little houses are luminously drawn – becomes small and circumscribed, and the hills and the shore, the sheep in the fields and the glinting sea, are visible, as it were, through a pane of slightly obscuring glass.
The landscape becomes an image of the world in which we live.

Is it an insufferable boast, in our world, to say I was content? Though it be intolerable, it was true then, and still is. And partly the blame (if blame is necessary) must lie on the quality of light that in these northern islands is called ‘the summer dim’- the dimness, or twilight, at midnight, that is – in which can be seen beauty enough for happiness. Not enough, nor nearly enough, for comprehension; yet enough to make comprehension unnecessary.