Doig has a great image, one of the greatest images I've ever encountered in a book. talking about his early childhood living with his parents in an up-country sheep camp, deep in the Rockies, far from school and town and other kids. it's only a sentence or two, but it stopped me for a long meditative pause. almost matter-of-factly he explains that because his book learning was parental and home-based, and because his parents were occupied and trusted him (the safety of the wilderness!) he could spend the whole day staring at a pool in the creek if he wanted. what he communicates is the naturalness of that, the rightness of it, but what it says is how far we've strayed, that that plain description of an uneventful moment should sound so close to paradise.

O'Nan's medicinal skills are perfectly rendered here. it's perfect because it works. that's healing. there's sickness, pathology, damage. it gets healed. he's a gifted story-teller, a voice that calms and inspires trust, then the magic starts spinning and suddenly you've read the whole book. what happened? something dark and sick was brought to the light and cured. there's something solid, fixed, a gravity of bearing that's carried by those of us who went to Viet Nam, that isn't carried by those of us who didn't go. it's not so much a division of kind as it is a division of labor, of responsibility, of presence and duty.

Doris Lessing's from somewhere else, not just Rhodesia either. Rhodesia on Aldebaran. there's prophecy in her work, not prediction but the voice of the divine channeled through the human tongue. when searching for the divine, people are mostly trained to look for the sparkle and gleam of the cinematic angel, when the real thing is scary, profound and intimidating. she's someone I've neglected over the years, I don't know why, but this book has made me regret that. it would sit well on a shelf next to John Berger's 'King: A Street Story'. it's testimony, testifying, like bright, clean water in this dark, dry time.