IN THE LAND OF THE TEMPLE CAVES

Seeking some balance to the destructive impulse of 9/11, Turner (When the Boys Came Back, 1996, etc.) embarks on a quest to experience the life-affirming properties of ancient art in the temple caves of France.

The author’s world took on a bad wobble in the wake of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers: he couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t write. He needed to restore some equilibrium and sensed he might find it in a personal exploration of the irreducible, unmediated artworks of the Ice Age, the still-mysterious cave paintings of Rouffignac, Trois Frères, Gabillou, Les Eyzies. What Turner experiences in France, and tenders here, is sweeping. He comfortably delineates place as he moves about the French countryside, but often weds these portraits to uncomfortable imagery: of Oradour-sur-Glane, site of a Nazi atrocity in 1944; of the murder of a friend’s child; of the story about a maquis officer’s execution. He savors the pleasures of food, wine, and friendship twined with the riddle of the people who lived thereabouts thousands of years before, seeming quite happy that their rites, narratives, and significations remain in the realm of speculation. The cave art’s magnificence reminds Turner of another “largely anonymous genre—the folk blues—that had arisen to help the troubled in mind achieve a parity with circumstance.” His being is suddenly flooded with appreciation for a grand and burly antiquity that is “massive, dense, alive with shaggy Ice Age life.” These are not points of debate, but concussions to his sensibilities; Turner ultimately can see the artwork as a celebration of life’s luminosity, as remembrance and thanksgiving, and as a panic hole down which we can dive for sanctuary when night brings its revenants.

Art was the vehicle but life was the goal, and the author combines his skills as a novelist, travel writer, and cultural critic to forcefully underscore its power.