The Blue Afternoon

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The Blue Afternoon
Author	William Boyd
Publisher	Vintage Press
Publication date	1993
ISBN	067977260X

The Blue Afternoon (1993) is a novel by William Boyd. It won the Sunday Express Book of the Year in the year of its publication and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.

1 Plot introduction
2 Plot summary
3 References

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[edit] Plot introduction

By 1902, the Americans have taken the Philippines from Spain and then have fought a brutal war, as little remembered as the "Ice-cream War" and just as savage, against Filipino nationalists or insurrectos. To the outer regions of the world the Americans have brought the wrath of a Manifest Destiny by which nearly a quarter of a million insurrectos and their allies will perish. The United States Army itself will lose 5,000 men.

The Manila that the Yankees have inherited is a stagnant colonial city. Here the more obvious aspect of the rule of Governor William Howard Taft and his officials is a withering code of respectability at odds with the climatic cycle of downpour, heat and rot. This tension manifests itself in a bizarre way: the American chief of constabulary begins to find the bodies of murdered American soldiers, slashed open and then sewed up in a particular way, among the old trench lines around the city.

And then, in a Manila park, a young mestizo surgeon named Carriscant, who is half-Scot and half-Filipino, is nearly shot between the eyes by a stray arrow from a newcomer to the Philippines, a well-bred, well-wed Yankee archer named Delphine Sieverance.

Boyd tells his subsequent tale of amoral, obsessive and cunning love in flashback from yet another time and place: Los Angeles in 1936. In Los Angeles, at the book's start, Kay Fischer, a young architect of the International style, is approached by the now elderly Carriscant. He tells her he is her father, and enlists her on that basis to aid him both financially and emotionally in his quest for the certainly aging, perhaps dead, beloved Delphine. Kay is ripe for such a quest, having been treated villainously by her former architecture partner and an ex-husband. Crossing the Atlantic with Carriscant, she records his memoirs of crazy love in old Manila, and these form the heart of the book.

[edit] Plot summary

The young Carriscant is a discontented but progressive surgeon at the San Jeronimo Hospital. He has advanced theories about the making and treatment of surgical wounds and is at odds with his superintendent, a doctor named Cruz, who operates in a business suit and who handles the exposed internal organs of his patients with his bare fingers before toweling his hands off with any scrap of cloth that happens to be around. Carriscant's ally in this war of asepsis is a young anesthetist named Pantaleon, whose secret passion is a flying craft of his own devising, with which he intends to win the international Amberway-Richault Prize for a flight of 100 meters.

It is in Carriscant's consulting rooms at San Jeronimo, amid Cruz's curses, Pantaleon's dreams of flight and the inquiries of the chief of constabulary, that Delphine and Carriscant will achieve their first dreamlike, climate-transcending adultery during "a brief blending of mauve thundercloud and late afternoon luminescence."

There is a tremendous imminence and oddity in both the publicly sanctioned social events and the secret, illicit meetings of Carriscant and Delphine. His first intimacy with her is to operate on her for septic appendicitis, an operation rarely successful at the time. The times demand more of him than surgical skill, however. As "platoons of alternative existences lined up to mock him," Carriscant becomes capable of heroic berserkness. For example, to find a pretext to enter a house Delphine is visiting, he sets fire to a clump of cane in the garden so he will have an excuse to rush in as a rescuer. The lovers will follow even more dementedly original and awesome strategies. Carriscant and Delphine regularly meet and make love in the bamboo-and-thatch barn where the contraption lies "like a giant botched model of a dragonfly, crudely conceived." However, there is murder story that runs nearly parallel to the romance and ultimately intersects with it.

As for Kay Fischer in 1936, her motivation for collaborating with Carriscant, who makes claims for parenthood but offers no proof, is sometimes poorly explained: "He had asked me to come with him to Santa Fe and, for some reason, and much to my astonishment, I agreed at once, without any reflection or any regrets." Kay seems such a pale presence in her own era that she seems outbalanced by Carriscant's huge amoral obsession of 1902. Her architectural theories, for example, have interest and are emphasized early in the story but do not come to anything except an early thwarted attempt to build a house.^[1]