SOURCE: Jordan, Justine. “I'm Not Turning the Clock Back, I'm Taking It Off the Wall and Mending It.” London Review of Books 20, no. 21 (29 October 1998): 25.

In the following review, Jordan lauds Thorpe's narrative skill in Pieces of Light, though cites shortcomings in the novel's overriding symbolism.

‘You,’ the mother of six-year-old Hugh informs him [in Pieces of Light], ‘are the only white child in the whole of West and Central Africa, that I know of.’ The remote outpost of Empire, made up of a few crumbling concrete bungalows perilously perched between crocodile-infested river and ever-encroaching forest, had looked like Eden to the newly wed Arkwrights, fleeing the killing fields of the Great War with the noble colonial ideal of winning over the natives by example rather than terror. But it is no place to bring up an English child, especially one ‘born bush’ and already finding his metaphors in...