Books: Identical Twins, Uncommon Men

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And there it remains for the next 60 years and the last half of the novel. A narrative letdown, of sorts, might be expected at about this point in the story. Lewis and Benjamin seclude themselves specifically so that nothing unexpected or notable will happen to them. Yet their author shows how extraordinary such ordinary lives can seem. For one thing, the twins are at ease in a landscape of striking beauty and variety. Each year spring renews the earth around them: "Shreds of cloud hung motionless in the sky. The hills were silvery in the sunlight, the hedges white with hawthorn, and the buttercups spread a film of gold over the fields. The paddock was thick with bleating sheep." As old men, Lewis and Benjamin follow the trails of their childhood: "Along the horizon, the hills were layered in lines of hazy blue; and they reflected how little had changed since they walked this way with their grandfather, over 70 years ago."

The twins change no more than their surroundings. They remain steadfastly childlike. After their parents' death, both sleep in their double bed, platonically, utterly innocent of Freud or of any sense of guilt or impropriety. Their naivete is secured through solitude. News of the outside world comes, if at all, as a whisper. The local paper headlines the huge salmon caught, after a three-hour struggle, in a nearby pool, and then mentions in passing: "Allies enter Berlin—Hitler dead in Bunker—Mussolini killed by Partisans." News of atomic bombs over Japan a few months later gives the twins identical nightmares: "That their bed-curtains had caught fire, that their hair was on fire, and their heads burned down to smoldering stumps."

Their dream is antipodal, embodying the horrors of all that they have been spared. And their story, as Chatwin constructs it, is an oblique commentary on the times of their lives. Posterity, should there be any, may well look back on this century as the time of displaced masses, victims of revolutions that threatened to set them free. The story of two brothers leading quiet lives in a changeless pocket of the world is a still point within the center of the chaos. Chatwin evokes a time of homelessness through the story of those lucky enough to stay home. —By Paul Gray