““The real protagonists of the Quartet are surely the parched and beautiful deserts of the biblical lands, with their oases and ruins, and above all the Holy City of Jerusalem itself. Whittemore is profoundly in love with these, and it’s a love that shines forth in all the books. Much of the “talky” nature of the book comes not just from his characters endless speculations and declarations, but from their loving memories of past nights spent idling by the Nile, or the magnificence of the pyramids at dawn, or the smell of a scented garden during some long-ago secret assignation. What you come to realize as you read, unconsciously at first, and then with growing awareness, is that these are not really digressions at all, but rather the very meat of the book. The land speaking to the people, and the people speaking to each other in an endless cycle is the closest definition of what it’s all “about”, if one needs to pursue its meaning into some final corner. The book, and the whole Quartet, is a monument to digression, to the necessity of the circuitous and the roundabout as the only way to truth. Certainty of vision, unquestioned clarity of purpose, leads only to oppression—as the ruthless and single minded Nazi presence hovering in the background serves to remind us.””
