Dark Star Safari is an account of Paul Theroux’s travels through Africa, shunning easy and convenient travel methods in favour of treacherous trains, dodgy taxis and tiny vans stuffed full of people and their belongings.  Along the way he meets a whole variety of people from different walks of life, some old friends from his previous stay in Africa working for the Peace Corps and some new acquaintances.  There are waiters, prostitutes, diplomats, Indian shopkeepers, white farmers, Rastafarians, ex-convicts and many more, all with a story to tell which become part of Theroux’s own overarching story of his travels.

This book is interesting because of what it is: Theroux’s journey is undeniably ambitious in scope and Dark Star Safari stands as a testament to that.  It was a huge undertaking, accessing such a wide cross section of people from so many places, and the fact that he was able to write the book at all is impressive.  It’s also an area that is entirely new to me and I learnt a great deal from the book.  I had no idea, for example, that there were so many Indians who migrated to various African countries to set up businesses and new lives, and Dark Star Safari is a gold mine of information such as this for the ignorant reader such as myself.  He also presents a perspective on foreign aid (that it is often doing more harm than good) which I hadn’t really considered before,  probably because Africa isn’t something that I read about terrible often, and certainly gave me pause for thought.  My experiences of people travelling through Africa tend to come courtesy of Comic Relief and feature television personalities presenting pitiful sights while asking for my financial aid, so regardless of whether you agree with Theroux’s controversial point of view, it’s definitely interesting to read from the perspective of someone seeing the same sights and instead saying that perhaps aid isn’t helping anyone.

My issues with this book don’t stem from it’s subject matter but from Theroux himself, who I found to be an utterly insufferable narrator.  He is so scathing and dismissive of so many of the people he meets that he frequently comes across as boorish and unpleasant.  He scorns the tourists on the Nile cruise on which he embarks partly because they are on a Nile cruise (the hypocrisy of this seems lost on him) and partly because they have the temerity to ask questions!  How dare people travelling in a foreign country to see historical sights want to learn about things?  What a ridiculous notion!  He is equally derogatory about many of the diplomats he meets (although he does love name dropping), the Christian missionaries towards whom he is deliberately antagonistic, and the foreign aid workers who won’t give him a lift, which seems rather unnecessary.  By all means criticise the aid system, but being provocative towards the individuals who are trying to help and work within a flawed system primarily because they won’t give you a lift (which is hardly part of their job) comes across as whining.  He also seems to have an over-inflated sense of his own importance, being shocked upon his arrival in Malawi to discover that no one at the American embassy has responded to his generous offer to hold a few lectures during his stay there out of the goodness of his own heart (and so he can celebrate his birthday, of course).

I found his sexual references to be totally unnecessary and added nothing to the book.  I appreciate that a lot of the women he meets are prostitutes and that they have some interesting stories to tell, but his self-congratulatory attitude at not taking advantage of them himself I found rather distasteful.  In a similar vein, his sexualising of many of the women he comes across is unpleasant and makes Theroux seem like a bit of a dirty old man (which, at sixty, he kind of is).  His completely irrelevant references to the erotic novel that he is inspired to write as he travels are equally unnecessary and I would have preferred it if this whole aspect of the book had been left out.

His writing is very journalistic in style, which some might enjoy as it feels very factual and efficient.  However, when I read a travelogue, I want it to make me feel as though I’m actually there, not that I’m listening to someone a bit dull but very accurate tell me what it’s like being there.  Every time there is a market it is described as ‘medieval’, and it quickly gets rather old and tired.  There are other times though, when the descriptions are absolutely perfect and evoke wonderful images of these strange countries, such as when he describes Cairo:

The smoke from the fires lit in braziers, the stink of the pissed-on walls, the graffiti, the dust piles, the brick shards, the baked mud, the neighbourhood so decrepit and worn, so pulverized, it looked as though it had been made out of wholewheat flour and baked five thousand years ago and was now turning back into little crumbs.  (pp. 9-10)

Sadly, these flashes of lovely writing come all too infrequently for my liking, and are overshadowed by the way that Theroux himself comes across.  Not a writer I’ll be reading again, I think.

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux.  Published by Penguin, 2003, pp. 495.  Originally published in 2002.

The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of the Price family who travel from Georgia to act as missionaries in the Congo in 1959.  The story is told through the eyes of the mother, Orleanna, and her four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May and the reader experiences everything through them, from day to day trials and tribulations to significant tragedies, from personal hardships to national political upheaval which swept the Congo in the 1960s following its independence.  The story does not end with the conclusion of their time in Africa, but extends beyond this to show the impact that the events that took place there have had on all the family members.  Neither religion nor politics are favourite themes of mine, but the novel is about so much more than this; they provide a framework for what is really an exploration of humanity.

Writers who can successfully assume several voices in one novel and actually make them distinct enough that I can tell who is speaking without having to check the chapter headings impress me immensely, and Barbara Kingsolver has this down to a fine art.  All of the Price women are determinedly individual and, through their differing perspectives, they each reveal different aspects of life in the Congo.  Orleanna’s narratives are always written retrospectively and are filled with a barely restrained hysteria from the very beginning, the reasons for which only become clear towards the end of the book.  Rachel is the eldest and the most resistant to life in the Congo, and her sections are a heartbreaking combination of trying to act and sound grown up while desperately needing to be babied and looked after in this strange land.  Leah, the stronger of the twins, is the most vocal of all the women and adapts best to Congolese ways.  Through her, although the reader still sees the village of Kilanga and its inhabitants from the perspective of a white outsider, it is the perspective of a white outsider who understands and does her best to be assimilated and accepted among the Africans.  Adah is Leah’s physically weaker twin, partially crippled from birth and largely silent.  Her sections of the narrative display a fey intelligence and shrewdness and her observations into the people around her are keen.  Ruth May is the baby of the family, and her parts of the story are filled with a bittersweet innocence, as she observes and reports the situations around her without comprehension of their true meanings or implications.  With these five remarkable women, Kingsolver weaves a tapestry of life in the Congo at this difficult time which had me completely emotionally engaged from beginning to end.

In addition to drawing me in on the levels of character and plot, The Poisonwood Bible is highly technically written as language, both in practice and as a concept, is very important and every single word feels as though it has been carefully chosen for maximum impact.  Rachel, for example, frequently gets words confused in her attempts to sound older than she is and so will often say things that are either not what she means or are just nonsense.  I’m also reasonably sure that she never uses Congolese words or phrases, indicative of her resistance to the culture and her desire to remain separate, whereas the other women all gradually absorb these into their vocabulary.  Adah in particular thrives on these new words and their possible uses as she turns language inside out and upside down in order to extract every possible nuance of meaning from them.  Her use of palindromes and the way that Kingsolver deploys them throughout the book is something that I found particularly interesting.  It is also telling that silent girl is the one who understands language the best, as it draws attention to all the things in this book that go unsaid.  I never thought I’d use these terms outside of university, but Kingsolver makes excellent use of the gap between signifier and signified.

In short, I found this book brilliant on every level, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.  Published by Faber andFaber, 2000, pp. 616.  Originally published in 1998.

Title:

Author: Chinua Achebe

Published: Heinemann, 1986, pp. 152.  Originally published 1958

Genre: African fiction

Blurb: The story is the tragedy of Okonkwo, an important man in the Igbo tribe in the days when white men were first appearing on the scene…  Mr Achebe’s very simple but excellent novel tells of the series of events by which Okonkwo through his pride and his fears becomes exiled from his tribe and returns, only to be forced into the ignominy of suicide to escape the results of his rash courage against the white man…  He handles the macabre with telling restraint and the pathetic without any false sense of embarrassment.

When, where and why: I bought this book because it was on a list of potential extra reading for a lecture on post-colonialism in my first year of university, part of a course introducing us to different literary ideas.  Evidently I decided post-colonial literature wasn’t for me, as I focused on different areas of that course for essays and exams and this book has gone unread ever since.  I decided to read it now as it’s very different from what I usually read (books by people who tend to be white, probably British and most likely dead) and I think it’s good to read outside my usual box from time to time.  It qualifies as book 26/50 for my Books Off the Shelf Challenge.

What I thought: I’ve already said that post-colonial literature isn’t really my thing, and this book sadly did nothing to change that.  I’m not denying that Chinua Achebe does accomplish what he sets out to do in Things Fall Apart by presenting an alternative view of the white colonisation of Africa, and I’m sure it’s very clever, but for me it wasn’t an enjoyable read.  Although there were some aspects that I really liked,  the vast majority was not to my taste at all.

What I enjoyed about the text was its presentation of Igbo culture and customs.  I think that the use of Igbo words is particularly effective in creating a sense of place, although I was very glad that I accidentally discovered the glossary at the back of the book as until that point I had felt rather lost.  There are some surprisingly humorous moments which serve to illustrate the differences between the expected norm of Igbo society and what an audience of western readers might assume, such as when a huge swarm of locusts arrives in the village.  To me, this suggested a plague of Biblical proportions and disaster for the village, but in fact the villagers are excited and pleased because locusts are a rare and tasty delicacy and so the swarm represents an opportunity for a welcome change in diet, and I really enjoyed this reversal of my expectations.  In a similar vein is the supremely logical explanation of polytheism by one of the villagers:

We make sacrifices to the little gods, but when they fail and there is no one else to turn to we go to Chukwu.  It is right to do so.  We approach a great man through his servants.  But when his servants fail to help us, then we go to the last source of hope.  We appear to pay greater attention to the little gods but that is not so.  We worry them more because we are afraid to worry their master.  (p. 129)

Unfortunately, while the setting and background of Things Fall Apart is an interesting departure from what I usually read, I found the story to be a disappointment.  The narrative is episodic, but these episodes often seem unfinished.  In one chapter, a child is sick and it is feared that she might die, but in the following chapter it appears that some time has passed and the child is well again although there has been no mention of a cure or recovery.  In another chapter, the poor weather means that Okonkwo’s entire crop fails leaving him near destitute, yet in the next one he is a rich, respected man with a successful farm and no indication of how he passed from one state to the other.  The resolution of important plot points that I expected rarely came, and I found this lack of completion increasingly irritating.  Perhaps the unfinished episodes are supposed to reflect that things are falling apart, but whatever the reason it isn’t for me.

Narrative aside, the primary obstacle to my enjoyment was the protagonist.  Okonkwo is utterly unlikeable, but isn’t the sort of interesting villain that I enjoy disliking: he is brutish, violent and pigheaded.  Although there are suggestions that Okonkwo does have feelings but society and cultural conventions force him not to show them because that would be weak, he seems unique in his brutality rather than fllowing an accepted trend.  Okonkwo beats his wives and even tries to shoot one of them, yet another man who does the same is condemned and punished by the tribe, so this casual violence cannot be an accepted norm.  I disliked him so much that I couldn’t bring myself to care when things fell apart for him, particularly as this was at least partially through his own actions.

Overall, I enjoyed this book as a presentation of a particular culture but not as a story, and I think it would have been more effective for me if both had been equally as good.

Where this book goes: Although this wasn’t my favourite book (to say the least) I’m going to keep it along with my other university books.  I consider them to be a physical record of what I have studied, good and bad, and even though I didn’t actually read this one until much later it still belongs with the rest of them.

Tea talk: I’ve been continuing with my little sample packet of Char’s Assam recently.  It has a much more robust taste than I tend to favour, but with practice I’m managing to brew it just right so it’s delicious to drink.  I’m tempted to order myself a larger tin of this soon, as I’ve only got enough left for one or two cups.

Title:

Author: Martha Bacon

Published: Puffin Books, 1971, pp. 220

Genre: Children’s historical fiction

Blurb: ‘My little panther’, Nono’s father called her, but he didn’t get the chance to say it for long.  Her African village was destroyed and she first lived in the bush then was sold as a slave, given a name and a home and then — horrifyingly — sold once more into the hands of pirates.  A rich, exciting story about a fascinating and thoroughly believeable character.

When, where and why: I have a nasty feeling that I bought this book when I was the correct age for the target audience, which would make it at least thirteen years old.  It has languished on my shelves ever since, so it definitely qualifies for my Books Off the Shelf Challenge.  I was prompted to read it now by a challege in which I am participating on Goodreads, one of the criteria of which is to read a young adult book.

What I thought: Some children’s books are so delightful and charming that I love them just as much now as I did when I first read them so many years ago.  They have vivid, engaging characters and absorbing stories which draw me in time and time again.  Particular favourites are the wonderful stories of E. Nesbitt: The Railway Children and Five Children and It and the subsequent books. Reading Sophia Scrooby Preserved, I got the feeling that I would have really enjoyed it when I was eight or so, but it lacked the elusive magic necessary to translate into a book which I could still enjoy as someone in their twenties.

However, I do think it would be rather unfair to judge this book from my adult perspective when I’m clearly no longer the target audience, as this has all the elements which make for a good, if not great, children’s book.  It has a likeable and resourceful heroine in Pansy, as Sophia Scrooby is known, and a series of suitably far-fetched but exciting adventures for her to undertake.  It has danger, magic, and history.  It has so many of these things that at times they can feel a bit rushed.  Nono (as the heroine is initially known) sees her village being destroyed by Zulus, goes to live with a herd of impalas, then journeys to the coast and is sold as a slave without pausing for breath or reflection.  As a child, I would probably have found this fast-paced and exciting, but reading the book now I wanted more detail and development.

I thought the pictures throughout the book were a lovely accompaniment to a sweet story, and I would recommend this book as a good historical adventure for readers aged between eight and ten.  For me now it was a quick, simple, enjoyable read, but not worth revisiting.

Where this book goes: This book is going off to BookMooch to look for a new home.  It wasn’t bad (my usual reason for getting rid of books) but there’s no way I’m ever going to reread this or want to lend it to anyone and as I’m not likely to be spawning for many years it’s definitely not worth hanging onto for future generations to read.  It will be good to clear some room on my shelves.

Tea talk: I read this book while sipping some lovely golden Darjeeling.  First flush is just starting to be available in the shops now and I’m taking full advantage of that.

Title: The Last Time They Met

Author: Anita Shreve

Published: Abacus, 2001, pp. 360

Genre: Fiction

Blurb: When Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes meet at a writers’ festival in Toronto, it is the first time they have seen each other for twenty-six years.  Theirs is a story bound by the irresistible pull of true passion — a love which begins in Massachusetts in the early 1960s, is rekindled in Kenya in the 1970s, and which is about to play out its astonishing final episode…

Where, when and why: This is another book which seems to have mysteriously appeared on my shelves, as I have no idea where, or indeed why, I bought it.  This isn’t my usual type of book, but I thought a gentle romance might be in order after A Clockwork Orange.  It also counts towards my Books Off the Shelf Challenge.

What I thought: I should have taken it as a warning that I could think of no reason why I might have wanted to read this book, as I’m afraid there’s no nice way to say it, but I didn’t get along with the book at all for a whole host of reasons.  Perhaps it’s partly that, not being a woman in my 50′s dreaming of reconnecting with my childhood sweetheart, I am not exactly the book’s target audience, but I’m erring on the side of it just being bad.  It’s very difficult for me to discus it without some spoilers, but really I think I’m saving you the pain of having to read this book yourselves.

Firstly, there’s the problem of the characters.  Annoyingly, this book decides to skip the bother of character development in favour of the much easier tactic of emotional manipulation.  Compelling, complex and interesting characters clearly aren’t necessary as long as you provide enough trauma and misfortunes in their lives, no?  No.  It seemed that just about everything unfortunate under the sun that could possibly happen to a person had happened to Linda and Thomas in The Last Time They Met: the deaths of parents, spouses and children, rape, terrible accidents (which leave them remarkably unscathed), alcoholic children.  The list goes on, but it would be just as tedious to continue to list them as it was to read about them.  Even more annoyingly, half of these incidents were totally irrelevant to the plot and so it seemed an unnecessarily desperate attempt to add pathos.  As I refused to be taken in by this lazy way of trying to make Linda and Thomas appear relatable, I rather found them irritating, angsty and selfish, which is hardly a winning combination.

Secondly, there’s the plot, which essentially comprises the aforementioned irritating, angsty, selfish characters trying to resist each other, having sex and then being torn apart by circumstances.  However, in order to try and make things different, this book starts at the end when Linda and Thomas meet for the last time and then gradually works backwards through their three encounters.  In some books, this works; this is not one of them.  Usually, books which adopt this technique drop a trail of intriguing hints about what has gone before designed to pique the reader’s interest, but not in this book.  Instead, there are vague references to the past which are neither sufficiently expanded to hook the reader in to want to know the missing details, nor opaque enough to lead the reader to think that something is being deliberately hidden.  It was like standing and listening politely to two people talking about occasions from their shared past, but who never mention any specifics because the two of them don’t need to: I felt excluded but not really all that bothered about being left out because I couldn’t bring myself to be interested.  The way the book ended was truly dire; I’m not going to say what it was, but it was abrupt, unskilled and once again going for shock value over narrative development.  Had I been expecting any better by this point I would have been very disappointed.

Finally, there is the fact that The Last Time They Met takes itself so seriously.  Obviously, given the list of terrible things which happens to the characters, I wasn’t expecting this book to be sweetness and light, but there is no levity at all.  Despite this, the author is prone to saying some of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read, which seem all the sillier by dint of being supposedly so weighty.  My absolute favourite has to be this little gem:

But she willed her antennae not to locate Thomas, who must have been behind her or absent altogether.  So that when she was seated at the back of the bus and watched him board, she felt both surprise and embarrassment, the embarrassment for his sudden emasculation, his having to ride a bus as schoolchildren did. (pp. 22-23)

Public transport?  No!  The shame!  The horror!  The sheer, unadulterated girliness.  Clearly nothing is more feminine or juvenile than the bus.  I genuinely have no idea what Anita Shreve was driving at with this pearl of wisdom, but it provided me with the only entertaining moment in the whole book — sadly so early on — so I can only be grateful for its baffling presence.

Where this book is going: It will come as no surprise that this book is not staying with me.  I’ve put it up on BookMooch in the hope that some other poor, unsuspecting individual might want to read it.  Keep your fingers crossed for me that someone out there does.