Synopses & Reviews
The Blue Mountains 1907: Eureka Jones, a young pharmacist's assistant with "historical eyes," falls in love with Harry Kitchings, a man who comes to town from some vague elsewhere to photograph clouds and the shadows they cast upon the land. Harry thinks of himself as a mystic, and he sees his pictures of clouds as images of the mind of God.
Eureka's love for Harry is at the heart of The Service of Clouds. The story unfolds in a town full of colorful eccentrics, and against the awesome backdrop of the Blue Mountains. Theirs is a stately, old-fashioned courtship, in which the first kiss comes after a couple of years; and after Harry suddenly leaves her, Eureka waits fifteen years before telling the story. Like a photographic print that gradually comes into focus, her account reveals, with greater and greater clarity, the pain she felt at the loss and the vast hole that Harry Kitchings's departure left in the landscape he loved to photograph.