Into Egypt

In 1962, Jo Catterall, a young English woman, seeking freedom, visits Israel. On the boat out she meets Gilbert, a slightly older kibbutznik who has spent some unedifying time in England, and who is returning home with yearning, a little chastened. An uneasy relationship develops between them which is marked with both of their dispositions - his drop in confidence and contrasting maturity, her youthful wish to spread her wings and celebrate her independence.

The story opens at a critical point of Jo's time in Israel, and then retraces all of her intriguing journey of discovery up to that point - her time with Gilbert initially, at his kibbutz in the arid south, in sight of the Egyptian border with its UN-manned sentry-boxes. Then, with their mismatchedness having taken its toll privately, Jo's resuming of the road, slowly heading towards Jerusalem. Along the way she meets other young travellers, and young Israelis, trying to live the new unconfined lives which are the promise of the 1960s. Finally, arrived in Jerusalem, it is the lecturer and political activist Zvi, whose existence, hemmed by potential violence, helps Jo to see the true nature of the danger in contested spaces, and the compromises people feel they need to make to survive in them.

Into Egypt, Rosalind Brackenbury's third novel, is a complex meditation on freedom and its illusions, and on the intricacies of relationship, which illustrates, with rich sensuality and dreamlike intensity, a young woman's path in unearthing her own mandate in life. With later chapters set in London in 1967 and back in Israel on a return trip in 1972, it traces Jo's emerging strength, as she grows into herself, suffers reversals, and finds new realisations. Textures, both in the flavour of conversations and the turns of the mind, as well as in the world's colours and the moods of the body, are an acknowledged Brackenbury specialty; here, this rich language speaks at its extraordinary full pitch.