The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting

In Cloud of Bone, Bernice Morgan draws our attention to the smallest descriptive detail in order to achieve a deeply moral aim: to show the myriad things that connect us across oceans and centuries. Early on, for example, she places a character in a small dark hole under a church and then haunts him with the memory of a valley “no wider than a street, a green fold filled with golden light.” More haunting for the reader is what else the character remembers: the sudden ransacking of the valley by three boys “exhilarated by the power of destruction.” Other characters in this novel will be drawn to the same small sanctuary, but it is up to the reader to make the connections and remember how easily a delicate green world can be destroyed.

Three seemingly unconnected narratives follow the book’s epigram by Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The first and the third, set in the 20th century, serve as a...