Terrestrials

de Paul West

In the beginning are two United States Air Force spy-plane pilots. Booth and Clegg, the elite of an elite men confident of their skills, men who know each other as well as they know themselves. Or so they think. When their spy plane plummets from the sky over Saharan Africa, the two find themselves thrust into a journey to the far poles of late-twentieth-century human experience, to places where all comfortable givens - like "friendship" and "duty" - quickly fall away. Booth and Clegg, it turns out, have not the slightest idea who they are, much less who the other is, but as we watch them struggle with their own contingency with disorienting shifts in the pressurization of time and space, we learn an astonishing amount about who we are, as Americans, as terrestrials. Along the way we are brought by one of our greatest living writers into the embrace of his most magnificent and tender dream so far, a majestic account of the trials and ceaselessly surprising consolations of two extraordinary, ordinary men.