The Forests of the Night the war as it really was, as James Kirkup observed, an "acid portrait of those who played at being members of the [French] Resistance". The novel's theme and title come from the opening lines to William Blake's poem "The Tyger": "Tiger, tiger, burning bright - in the forests of the night." "The Forests of the Night" was translated in 1951 into English by Nora Wydenbruck; it has not been re-printed since. Francis is the son of the Comte de Balansun, whose family resides in the French town of Saint-Clar, near the Pyrenees. Francis, in the beginning of the novel, skips
William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job identified with Job, as he spent his lifetime unrecognized and impoverished. Harold Bloom has interpreted Blake's most famous lyric, "The Tyger", as a revision of God's rhetorical questions in the Book of Job concerning Behemoth and Leviathan. Blake also depicted the story of Job throughout his career as an artist. The song of Enion in Night the Second of "The Four Zoas" also demonstrates that Blake identified with Job. Blake used symbols extensively in the illustrations; most notable is the use of right and left limbs in the figures. The right limb represents the spiritual and the good; the left,