He lies forever just beyond reach, but Mr. Nicholl proves conclusively that the chase can be its own reward.
The French authorities say Christopher Rocancourt was born on July 16 , 1967 in Honfleur, France, a tiny fishing village on the Normandy coast where local legend holds that buried treasure lies, forever out of reach, at the bottom of the murky bay.
How indeed could he hope to find himself, to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, forever, the solitary clue to his identity?
The events are those climactic moments of life that lie forever in the mind, each of them summoned up with deft precision: a disastrous visit by Emily to student daughter Liz, the tensions of a holiday in a French gîte.
And then he realizes he's made a horrible mistake: Bright visions came to haunt him of a world that could and should have been his, a world of intellect and sensibility that now lay forever mixed in his mind with "the East.
The reminiscences of school days, long-departed friends, and early, naïvely audacious adventures conjure a scaled-down Welles, whose cracker-barrel warmth reminds us that his mighty creations have a core of nostalgic yearning for an unforgotten modesty that lay forever just out of reach.
But the impulse behind the meditation is the same: the loss of self, lamented by the Consul — How indeed could he hope to find himself, to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, forever, the solitary clue to his identity?
And each one of the estimated 30,000 war memorials that pepper the French landscape lists the names of the sons and brothers, fathers and uncles who travelled to the great slaughterhouses of the Western Front and lie forever under the mud of the Somme and Ypres, Verdun and the Marne.
"But you can't lie forever.
Upon these dead... Now, in that cemetery in Padua, where they will lie forever, the Italian earth has closed upon David Raikes and his fellow flyers.
