Readers of David Diop’s previous novel, which won the International Booker prize and already feels like a classic of war fiction, probably won’t have forgotten the experience. At Night All Blood Is Black is narrated by a young Senegalese soldier recruited to fight for France in the first world war and brutalised in the trenches. Visceral horror, incantatory language and delicate thinking were welded in its slender form. Now Diop has brought his capacious mind to bear on an earlier period of encounter between Europe and Africa. Beyond the Door of No Return is the story of a French Enlightenment botanist who travels to Senegal to study plants and finds himself overwhelmed by love for an African woman.
Michel Adanson is an old man by the time he writes this tale of passion in a leatherbound journal, hoping that his daughter will find and read it. Releasing emotions that have been tightly guarded for the intervening 50 years, he goes back in memory to the hot night in 1752 when, in the village of Sor, he first heard about a woman who had been abducted and taken into slavery but, it was said, had somehow returned. Like a knight keen for a quest, but with the viable pretext of studying the plants en route, he sets out towards Cap-Vert to find her.
