On the Black Hill strikes the reader, at first glance, as something of a departure from Chatwin's previous two works. Firstly, the central narrative of the work concerns two twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin Jones, who rarely leave the boundaries of their Welsh hill farm, preferring the seclusion of their farmhouse to the diversions of the wider world. Secondly, the form of the novel is traditional, told in flashback with a linear chronological narrative. This appears a realist novel about everyday characters.
At heart, however, On the Black Hill embodies many of the same dichotomies that the rest of Chatwin's oeuvre take as their central theme. The twins operate as the personifications of many of the contradictions that found their expression more overtly in The Songlines or In Patagonia; between settlement and travel, between the ascetic and the aesthetic life, between celibacy and the pleasures of the flesh. The novel is, in words taken from Nicholas Shakespeare’s homage to Chatwin, In Tasmania, a ‘story about two ways of being in the world.’ (17) Lewis confesses to Lotte, the Viennese psychotherapist who becomes friends with the Jones twins after their mother’s death:
“Sometimes, I’d lie awake and wonder what’d happen if him
weren’t there. If him’d gone off...was dead even. Then I’d have
had my own life, like? Had kids?”
“I know, I know,” she said, quietly. “But our lives are not so
simple.” (203)
Chatwin, through the allegorical image of the twins, reaches out beyond the specifics of the novel to the internal dichotomy he perceives in every individual – and which he feels strongly within himself. The novel is widely considered one of Chatwin's most artistically successful works, and was made into a film by Andrew Grieve. The novel also secured the Whitbread 'Best First Novel Award' for its author.
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