Description
“The Burma of The Purple Plain is in its title, which is in turn a descriptive and metaphorical one. For the plain of Central Burma, flat, intensely hot and dry in the early year, ringed by mountains almost lost in fantastic heat haze, remains, to me at any rate, a purple plain purple in its hazy mountainous distances, purple in the splendour of its turbulent smouldering sunsets, purple in the garments of its people. And to me too, it has that other kind of purple-the purple that means glory of achievement, the triumph of man in adversity.”
Almost all that happens in The Purple Plain could have happened to a peacetime adventurer who had the bad luck to be lost in the Burma desert with no means of escape except his own feet. It is the story of a young man who wants to get himself killed because he has nothing to live for, and then changes his mind, only to find himself faced everywhere with ampler chances of death. It is a thing that has happened to many another young man. In other words it is the story of a personal and inner conquest-told by high physical action in an atmosphere of tropical heat and fatalism. Forrester, the young pilot who passionately desires death and then even more passionately desires life because of the Young Burmese girl Anna, is, I hope, a universal man. He is the elemental and refined product of our time-the fighting man who is also hypersensitive, the man of supreme physical courage on whom emotional life impinges nervously.” -the author in The Literary Guild Review.
Hardcover, 256 pages. In fair pre-loved condition with the exception of some age spots on pages and a few creased corners.