strange and random happenstance

My mom had a special place in her heart for all things African. Books, movies, photography, anything to do with Africa she would devour. Even excruciatingly long slide shows from friends who had just gotten back from safari. I remember watching Out of Africa with her and her complete and total anger at Denys Finch-Hatton being played by Robert Redford. Her rage was incandescent. Whereas she thought Klaus Maria Brandauer was sheer perfection as Bror von Blixen-Finecke. As you can see, strong opinions run in my family. What she loved more than anything though was The Flame Trees of Thika written by Elspeth Huxley. In fact the 1987 edition published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson was one of her favorite books of all time. So one Christmas I bought her the 1981 miniseries on DVD assuming that she probably hadn't seen it because it aired right when she was pregnant with my brother. I never got to watch it with my mom, but my dad claims they did watch it and she enjoyed it. Personally I wish I could know her opinion on it because I am conflicted. I've now watched this series twice and the first time I saw it through Elspeth's eyes. A continent full of awe and wonder. The second time I watched it the paternalism and sheer theft of land by the British pissed me off. Even as I sit down to write this I'm not sure how to frame my thoughts. The Flame Trees of Thika is interesting in that it is set in Kenya before World War I when it wasn't yet the place to banish problematic relatives who then became known for their swinging lifestyle. Though I have a feeling had anyone brought up the notion to Elspeth's parents Robin and Tilly they might have been game. In fact a lot of my first viewing was how astonished that the scantily clad Robin with his toned muscles, high-waisted pants, and perfect coif was in fact David Robb who is most known for playing Dr. Clarkson on Downton Abbey. I actually got into the habit of taking screencaps and sending them randomly to my friends who are Downton Abbey fanatics and asking them if they could guess who the man in the picture was. My friend Sara literally, after almost giving up, said "Doctor from Downtown Abbey? Can't be…" And yet, she was right! This was just one distraction that made me take this show at face value. I was literally ogling the surface of David Robb, who I might add, is totally not my type. Also, Holly Aird as Elspeth is perhaps one of the best child actors I have ever seen. She's just the right level of intrigued and rebellious. Her awe and wonder at the world around her makes you feel the same way. Plus, she is untainted by prejudice, she takes the world as it is, the Africans are her friends, as are all the animals. She's a pure spirit in a cruel world. Because on rewatching this I was thinking again and again how cruel the British occupation of Kenya was. They just sold land that wasn't theirs to desperate people claiming that they could make their fortunes by growing coffee. The key thing is, this land wasn't theirs to buy or sell. And then the British hire the natives at slave labor wages and this is totally acceptable!?! It so so isn't. The Grants didn't have an easy go of things and they were trying to help all those they believed to be in their care, but for every Grant there are a dozen Palmers, people who build their big house and treat their servants horribly and are there to just go on a constant safari, killing their way across the continent. While I adore the work of John Hawkesworth and all the thought he puts into his shows, this show's British paternalism is too strong for me to wholeheartedly endorse it. As a look back onto another world it is valuable, but we have to take stock that it was wrong in the first place. And The Flame Trees of Thika doesn't do that.  

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Africa, British Empire, David Robb, Denys Finch-Hatton, Downton Abbey, Elspeth Huxley, Fifty-Five Years a Masterpiece, Holly Aird, John Hawkesworth, Kenya, Out of Africa, Paternalism, Robert Redford, The Flame Trees of Thika

I shall now interrupt our regularly scheduled programming (ie, Golden Summer) for a very special reason. Today I am the blog stop for the official virtual Lauren Willig tour (be sure to check out the rest of the stops too). That is correct, gentle readers, a blog tour for that most wonderful of books, The Ashford Affair. As you may recall, I spent April devoting my blog to Lauren Willig's first stand alone novel, The Ashford Affair, which I gather you all liked seeing as my blog analytics tell me that it was my second highest ever for hits in a single month. Personally, I know exactly why, Lauren is awesome. Also, it makes sense to have a little Lauren oasis during my Golden Summer... it was because of reading The Ashford Affair that I got on my 1920s kick, first with Mitfords then with mysteries, and eventually I ended up devoting the summer to 1920s whodunits. A nice progression of events and reading I must say. But let me tarry no longer, I reached out to you, my readers and asked what do you want to know from Lauren. Of course I slipped in one or two of my own questions, but I couldn't help it. Without further ado, I bring you Lauren.

Question: Seeing as The Ashford Affair is set in Kenya during the ‘Happy Valley’ days, if you were to have a dinner party with the Happy Valley Set, who would you invite? Might you leave Isak Dinesen off the guest list?

Answer: Yes, let’s leave Isak Dinesen at home! After reading up on that crowd, you do get the impression that she wasn’t quite the sympathetic character she was made out to be in the movie version of Out of Africa (although she did have some provocation). You get the sense that when people heard she was on her way, there was a muttered, “Quick, Karin’s coming—out the back door!”

Bror Blixen’s second wife, Cockie, on the other hand, sounds like she’d be fun to have around. We’d have to have Beryl Markham and Denys Finch-Hatton, of course: adventurers with stories to tell. And no Happy Valley party would be complete without Idina and Joss Hay, who, for all their hedonism, were both well-read, charismatic characters.

I’d leave out Alice and Frederic de Janze, though—he’d probably write a depressing book about it, and she might shoot someone.

Question: It seems that every person who settled in Kenya had a need to write a book, from Dinesen to Markham. What do you make of this phenomena?

Answer: Personally, I’m rather grateful for it, since it made my research much easier! It’s a skewed data set, though. When you look at the number of settlers who made their way to Kenya, the memoir writers were actually a fairly small percentage. In fact, that was one complaint that popped up as I was researching the period: that the flamboyant Happy Valley types overshadowed the fact that the bulk of the settlers in the region were hardworking farmers who kept their heads down and their farms running. For every Idina Sackville or Bror Blixen, there were a lot of people just minding their plows, but the gang who boozed it up at the Muthaiga Club left a disproportionately large footprint.

One thing I do find particularly interesting is the tilt, not just towards memoir-writing, but towards fictionalized memoir writing. One of my favorite sources, as I was reading up on the area, was Elspeth Huxley’s Flame Trees of Thika. It’s part memoir, part make believe, just like Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, the real and the fictional woven together in the guise of truth. In terms of physical details of life in Kenya, these books were gold mines, but I think there’s also something very telling in the fact that the line between fact and fiction in the narrative structure gets blurred. It goes to your next question, below, about the mystical lure of Kenya. Those settlers we’ve been talking about built a self-consciously mythologized image of the region and of their own place in it.

Question: What do you think is the mystical lure of Kenya? From English settlers back in the day to books set there, and even television shows like In the Heat of the Sun, what is the obsession with Kenya?

Answer: For the segment of English expats I was writing about, a lot of it had to do with escape and an attempt to rebuild or reclaim a romanticized version of their own past. The Great War had just torn through all levels of society and the old aristocracy was watching their estates become forfeit to death duties and rising costs. In 1919, the British government held a land lottery for plots of land in Kenya (then British East Africa). Larger plots could be purchased for relatively small sums. To the old Etonians who flocked to Kenya, Kenya was both a way to escape the horrors they had seen back in the old world and to rebuild their fortunes.

Some were straight out fortune hunters, hoping to make a killing in coffee or indigo (which generally worked out badly for them), but many harbored a romanticized vision of Africa as somehow untouched and unspoiled, a demi-Eden where a pre-war past could be recreated. That aspect comes out very clearly in their writings—there’s a lot of explicit comparison between the local tribes and medieval feudal societies—and also in their naming of their homes. Joss Hay, the Earl of Errol, one of the key members of the Happy Valley set, calls his plantation Slains: the name of the castle in Scotland his family had lost.

Question: Did your love of coffee make a book set on a coffee plantation inevitable?

Answer: It had less to do with my being a caffeine junkie and more to do with formative years spent watching the Britcom As Time Goes By. As I was writing Ashford, it was a running family joke that I should just call it My Life in Kenya, a la Lionel’s memoir.

Question: You have mentioned that a fair bit of The Ashford Affair set in Kenya was sadly a victim of edits, might we loyal readers someday see these pages as an extra on your blog?

Answer: In the past, I’ve rescued snippets of my Pink Carnation books from the cutting room floor, but those bits were small and discrete scenes. The cuts in Ashford were much more extensive—about a hundred pages set in Kenya in the late 20s and 30s. When I cut those segments, I reworked the rest of the novel to make up for those gaps. I felt like those chapters made sense in their original context in the novel, but they don’t stand on their own as fun little anecdotes, the way the Pink outtakes do. Those deleted chapters also make explicit incidents that, in the reworked version, are deliberately left ambiguous. So, the short answer is, probably not—although I might revisit those chapters at some point and see if there’s anything that can be salvaged for the outtakes section.

I will say that writing Ashford made me nostalgic for the doorstop novels of the 80s, when an author could safely write a thousand page tome. The original plan for Ashford involved a triple narrative—Clemmie, Addie, and Bea—in which we would follow both Addie’s and Bea’s threads right up through World War II. But the fashion right now is for leaner books, so the more ambitious and all-encompassing narrative had to be abandoned.

Question: Ancestry and our roots seem to be a big craze right now, what do you think it is that makes books revolving around family secrets so irresistible? 

Answer: My instinct is that it has something to do with the present being so uncertain. We live in uneasy times. The economy is shot, our sense of opportunity has been shaken; people are facing the prospect of rocky futures and straitened retirements. In those circumstances, there’s something very reassuring to turning to the past, to seeing what our grandparents or great-grandparents managed to struggle through and triumph. When you think of it, the last big era of the family saga and intertwined present/past narratives (Barbara Taylor, Judith Krantz, and so on) was back in the 70s and early 80s, which was another era of economic uncertainty and murky prospects. I think reading these books, especially the ones in which characters manage to fight their way from adversity to prosperity (or, in many cases, from prosperity, through a fall to poverty, and back to prosperity again) provides a sense of encouragement and hope, and that we as readers—in a parallel journey with the modern characters in the books—draw strength and a deeper understanding of our capabilities through comparison with the past.

Question: Now that you have successfully broken the limitations of writing just the Pink Carnation Series, what other stand alones do you see in your future?

Answer: I have another modern/historical hybrid (I’ve been told the au courant term is “time slip”) coming out next year, but since you ask about that below, I’ll skip the thumbnail sketch here.

As to what comes after that, there are three potential plots I’m playing with right now, all, surprisingly, twentieth century: one 1920s, one 1930s, one 1940s. I’m not quite sure which of these plot ideas is going to win out (each has its own particular allure), but, if I have my way, the next stand alone will be purely historical, with no modern component. As much as I’ve enjoyed writing the dual narratives in Ashford and the Victorian Book (aka stand alone #2), my real interest lies in the historical side, and that’s where I’d like to head next.

Question: Can you tell us more about the Victorian ‘Work in Progress’? (Miss Eliza added note, and have you finally watched Desperate Romantics, the Entourage of Victorian England?)

Answer: I have a weakness for what I think of as “house” books. I love books where the heroine inherits—or rents, or house-sits, or otherwise occupies—an old house, the dingier and more history crammed the better. If she can find some sort of mysterious artifact leading to a secret hidden in the house’s past, so much the better. (I blame this on a youth spent devouring Barbara Michaels novels.)

I also have a weakness for the Preraphaelite painters, for their lush compositions, their fascination with mythology, and their brash idealism.

The Victorian Book is a house book with a lost Preraphaelite painting. Basically, it’s my equivalent of chocolate with chocolate in it.

(Note to Miss Eliza: Nope, I still haven’t watched Desperate Romantics—I want to wait until the manuscript is all tied up and copyedited before I watch the show, so I can be sure that I’m not unconsciously letting it influence my portrayal of the painters. I’ve heard that it’s great fun, but not the most accurate.)

Anyway, here’s the thumbnail synopsis of the Victorian Book: it’s 2009 and my modern heroine, a financial analyst, has lost her job in the downturn. She inherits a house from an unknown great aunt in a suburb of London and goes out there to sort it out, with plans to sell. In the clean out process, she discovers not only some rather suspicious cousins and a disturbingly cute antiques shop owner, but also a Preraphaelite painting wrapped in crumbling paper, hidden behind the false back of a wardrobe. Her quest for the painting’s history takes up back to 1849, to the early days of the Preraphaelite movement and the tangled lives of the people who lived in the house back then.

For my Pink readers: the disturbingly cute antiques shop owner is one Nicholas Dorrington. Yes, that Dorrington. I snuck in a descendant of Miles and Henrietta as my (modern) leading man….

Question: Is Dare Me still a possible project?

Answer: Poor Dare Me. A contemporary romance novel that I started writing just for fun two summers ago, Dare Me has been a casualty of my souped-up publication schedule. (For those of you who haven’t seen it, you can find the first six chapters here.

Right now, I’m on a tight, two book a year schedule, which means that projects for which I’m not currently under contract fall by the wayside. That being said, I’m hopeful that I can find some time to work on Dare Me once the eleventh Pink book is safely in to my editor this fall. Now I just need to speed up my work on that Pink book….

Question: Do you usually have a couple in mind and an ending and then build the in-between parts or does the story unfold along the way and do you ever find yourself surprised by where your characters have taken you?

Answer: It varies book by book. Sometimes, I’m caught by a character and just need to follow that character and see where she—or he—goes. That was definitely the case with Miss Gwen in The Passion of the Purple Plumeria. In writing her book, I was primarily interested in seeing how her character unfolded and developed over the course of events. Other times, it will be a quirky historical incident I just need to use (like the underground Irish resistance managing to blow up their own headquarters in The Deception of the Emerald Ring), or a “what if” scenario, such as “what if a modern woman were to discover that nothing about her family was as it seemed?”

For the most part, though, I’d say I’m a character driven writer, which is why my books tend towards the latter scenario you mentioned: I’m constantly surprised by where my characters take me. I’ve learned that I’m best off being flexible and revising my plot plans as the story goes along, since the characters often develop in ways I would never have imagined. It can be nerve-wracking—I never know quite what’s going to happen, which is pretty scary when you’re only a few chapters in and a deadline is looming—but also keeps the writing fresh and exciting.

Question: Which book was the most fun to write and research?

Answer: That would be two different books. The most fun to research? Absolutely The Betrayal of the Blood Lily. I loved learning about the tangled intrigues of the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1804. With a mad ruler, a semi-insane vizier, an all female platoon of soldiers, and wet-nurses turned master of ceremonies, so much of what I was reading fell into my favorite category: when truth is stranger than fiction. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As for the most fun to write…. It would be a toss-up between The Masque of the Black Tulip and The Mischief of the Mistletoe, both of which had more than their fair share of madcap comedy.

Question: Now that the Pink Carnation series is winding down to an extent, do you plan to write more Pink novellas to bring back old characters?

Answer: There are still at least two books to go in the Pink series, Pink XI and Pink XII, so we’re not quite wound up yet. (Pink XI is Sally Fitzhugh’s book, slated to come out in August 2014. Unless something changes, Pink XII should be Jane’s book, presumably 2015, but I don’t have any hard and fast news about that yet.)

I’d love to revisit the older Pink characters with more novellas, but it all depends on timing. Now that I’m on the doubled up writing schedule, there is, sadly, less time to write just-for-fun novellas. On the plus side, it does mean two books a year rather than one; on the down side, fewer extraneous extras.

Question: *Note: stealing this one from Tracy Grant's interview of Deanna Raybourn on her blog: What four book characters (other authors, not yours) would you invite over for dinner and why?

Answer: Lord Peter Wimsey, for his ability to speak glorious nonsense; Elizabeth Peters’s Jacqueline Kirby (as a librarian, she’d have some excellent book recommendations); Jane Austen’s Emma, for all that gossip; and Mr. Rochester, because he smolders so nicely.

Ask me again tomorrow, and you’d probably get a different batch….

Question: What book by another author are you in love with right now?
Can I cheat and name multiple books?

Satisfying the gothic craving in me, I am deeply in love with Simone St. James’s two 1920s-set ghost stories, The Haunting of Maddy Clare and An Inquiry into Love and Death. I love ghost stories and these are particularly well done, just the right sort of prickles on the back of the neck with the Dorothy Sayers-esque 1920s tone.

Moving from windy nights to sunny beaches, the other book I’m in love with right now is Beatriz Williams’s A Hundred Summers, set in an upscale beach enclave in the 1930s as a young woman struggles to deal with her former fiance’s reappearance—as the husband of her former best friend. (Lily and Budgie in A Hundred Summers have a great deal in common with Addie and Bea in Ashford!)

Thanks so much for having me back here, Miss Eliza! It’s always a joy to visit Strange and Random Happenstance.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 3 comments  

Labels: As Time Goes By, Blog Tour, Desperate Romantics, Happy Valley, Kenya, Lauren Willig, Out of Africa, Pink Carnation, Rochester, The Ashford Affair, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, The Flame Trees of Thika

Mark of the Lion by Suzanne Arruda
Published by: NAL
Publication Date: December 5th, 2006
Format: Paperback, 346 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

"Here’s a closely guarded secret for you: the odds are that, on most topics and time periods, historical fiction authors tend to draw from a roughly similar pool of sources. (I say “most” because there are some periods for which there are oodles of accessible sources available, which stirs up the pool a bit.) When I read Mark of the Lion, after several months immersed in the history of British East Africa, I was deeply amused to recognize people, places, events and anecdotes. There are times when the past can feel like a very small place…." - Lauren Willig

Jade del Cameron is a plucky girl. Growing up in the American West she knows how to handle herself in just about any situation. Yet she is still haunted by her ambulance work in the great war. The insane laughing of the wounded will never leave her, nor will the memory of David. David wanted to marry Jade and have a happily ever after. Jade wasn't sure but didn't really have the chance to decide when David was shot down and died in her arms pleading with her to find his secret half brother and look into his father's suspicious death in Nairobi at the start of the war. Jade takes dying wishes seriously, and with writing work for the magazine The Traveler as cover, she sets out for British East Africa to find out just what is going on.

David's father did indeed die under strange circumstances. How was he mauled to death in a hotel, on the second floor? Africa though is not what Jade expected and it looks like her duty to David might be harder then she thought. Things happen in Africa. Weird things. Everyone just accepts this. Death by animal is common, even if it was in an uncommon location. Here they believe in witches capable of using animals as their familiars to kill. Yet, what if the witches are real? And what if they have taken against Jade?

As Lauren Willig says, "the past can feel like a very small place." This was indeed what I felt upon first cracking open the pages of Mark of the Lion. Having a little African reading extravaganza means that I am reading these books back to back. I try to insert a little something different between the volumes, but to all intents and purposes, I've been living in British East Africa for awhile now, both in fictional and non-fictional works. So therefore hearing anecdotes directly lifted from other books, in particular The Flame Trees of Thika, which I had just finished, seemed a little redundant. I would say this could have been amusing, seeing the same cast of characters through yet another author's eyes, but coming directly after reading the one, it felt a bit like flogging a dead horse. Thankfully Suzanne Arruda soon went off in her own unique direction that was actually inspired by a true tale from Bror von Blixen, the husband of author Isak Dinesen, and the book soon found it's own legs with a dash of danger and more then a little mysticism.

The mysticism is what really drew me into the story. For those who know me there are two obvious categories my reading tastes lean to, firstly is the historical fiction, secondly is the urban fantasy. By bringing in witches and animals controlled by these dark forces, it's like adding a dash of urban fantasy into Kenya's Happy Valley. While of course it's traditional folklore and not fantasy that is feeding the laibon, aka witch, isn't all urban fantasy rooted in folklore? Therefore this book is like the urban fantasy of the day, if the day was 1919. Even in more biographical books like The Flame Trees of Thika, Elspeth Huxley fully admits that whether you believe or not, that sometimes it's better to be open to other things that can not be understood. I love that Suzanne Arruda was willing to embrace the fact that there are just some things that can't be explained away unless you expand your definitions of what is possible and what is impossible. A world where everything can not be neatly compartmentalized and there is room for magic is a world I want to live in.

Now to the nit-picky bit, which little old me can never just skip. Let's talk about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder folks. This is a trap that many modern writers fall prey to. The thing is, while I fully admit that PTSD was around prior to it's official designation in the 1980s; if this were really a book set in 1919, yes Jade would be shell shocked after her work in the war, but there would be the whole "stiff upper lippedness" that had people dealing with it on their own and just carrying on as it were. Sure, you can use the excuse that she's American, so she handles things differently... but I've seen this more and more that any book written by a current writer set after a war the hero or heroine will have textbook PTSD, it's almost rote in mystery books at the moment. It just gets to be a bit much, know what I mean? I like that Arruda used a specific incident in Jade's past to have hyena's trigger her attacks, but still, enough with the PTSD, ok folks?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Ashford April, Bror von Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, Happy Valley, Isak Dinesen, Jade del Cameron, Kenya, Lauren Willig, Mark of the Lion, PTSD, Suzanne Arruda, The Flame Trees of Thika, Urban Fantasy

The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley
Published by:  George Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Publication Date: 1959
Format: Hardcover, 287
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition then one reviewed)

"This book was one of the great, unexpected benefits of researching The Ashford Affair. I’d recommend it to anyone, whether you’re doing background reading for a book set in Kenya or not. It is an utterly charming, fictionalized account of Elspeth Huxley’s childhood in Kenya as her aristocratic parents essayed several largely unsuccessful experiments in farming. As such, it’s a little bit Little House on the Prairie and a little bit Anne of Green Gables with a hearty dollop of retrospective worldly wisdom." - Lauren Willig

In the late twenties, Kenya became known for it's "Happy Valley." A place of paradise and pleasure, where you could start your life over a make a fortune in coffee or dairy. But to those who settled there before the first world war, it was an entirely different world. In 1913 Elspeth Huxley's family moved to Thika to start a coffee plantation. They had heard there where fortunes to be made... only coffee takes at least five years to bring in any crop, and that's if everything goes right. With insects that would make anyone's skin crawl, to fighting amongst their workers who belonged to waring tribes, to curses and black magic, life is far harder than any of them would have expected. Yet the friendships they make with their workers, who are loyal in their own way, and with their fellow settlers, leads to an interesting and diverse community that Elspeth grows up in.

The beauty of Africa, while harsh, still is inspiring. Elspeth sadly reminiscences that the days when the plains would be covered with a plethora of game and where there were some areas in which you were probably the first human ever to set foot was soon to end. The settlers would change the landscape forever, but luckily, there was an inquisitive little five year old who saw Thika for the magical world it was and forever preserved it in these pages. 

A few years back I was driving back with a friend through southern Missouri from another friends wedding in Arkansas when I spied a billboard for the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Mansfield. As you can imagine, he was a bit dismayed by the fact that he now had to go on a tour of Laura's Rocky Ridge Farm. Before the house tour, which hand some interesting carpentry thanks to Laura's husband Almonso, there was a nice museum to wander through. In one of the cases with pride of place was Laura's own guns, which she used often to kill small game. That's when it struck me, the reality of Laura's life versus her books. Thankfully I was not the other two tourists who where having issues coming to gripes with the fact that the tv show was pure fiction, while Laura's books where, not fiction, but her interpretation of her life.

The Little House Books had presented a a sort of glorious golden childhood of living in sod houses and tapping maple syrup. Right about now you might be wondering why I'm going on about Laura Ingalls Wilder in a book review for Elspeth Huxley, but the truth is that Huxley's book, The Flame Trees of Thika, is Little House without the softened edges. They are both fictionalized but at the heart is the truth of their upbringing. Unlike Little House, you are not spared details about ticks and ants and dead animals and goat sacrifices. You will get terrified of what could happen to your pets in Africa. You will not be thinking, oh, how lovely to life in a sod house, no, you will be thinking, dear lord, I am so glad someone didn't have to heat up a needle and use it to extract an egg sack from under my toe nails. Because that is what Kenya was for Elspeth.

Now, I'm not saying that Kenya isn't Elspeth's her version of heaven and paradise combined, it's just that she doesn't stint on the whole picture, the good and the bad. This is what makes it such a great read. You are not just contained only in her little world of house and hearth, but all the characters in her life. Because of the farm needing so many workers, you get a glimpse of tribal life and the strong differences between the Kikuyu and the Masai. How the natives should never be underestimated in their cunning, a story about the Masai stealing cattle but shipping it via railway under the "true" owners name is one example. I say "true" owner, because Elspeth digs deep into the mindset of the Africans, and how their definition of property is far more fluid than Europeans.

Elspeth, growing up around these people, has a way of not condemning them for being different, but being able to see both sides. She understands why her parents and other settlers would be annoyed, but she sees that, through the natives eyes, that they aren't to blame, it's how they live. This is so refreshing. She is more an anthropologist, seeing everyone for what they are, versus the typical British Imperialist's view of do as I say, live as I do, that is the only way. In fact, by the time I got to the end of the book all the characters had become my friends so deeply that I didn't want to leave them, even if World War I was starting. Thankfully I see there is a sequel!

Now I must sidetrack everything to do a little review of this edition. This edition was released with a new introduction in the late 80s after the success of the BBC miniseries. Sadly it is long out of print, which baffles me. The book is far more beautiful then the little paperback one you can currently get. There are luscious illustrations by the Kenyan artist Frances Pelizzoli. Not only do they bring Kenya alive, but they so sync with the story. Their placement in the text is perfect and they are so accurate to the story. Nothing annoys me more then when a book is illustrated and the illustrations don't go with the text. The point of illustrations is to illuminate and expand your connection with the text. The most recent grievous perpetrator of this was in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, where Dave McKean, a frequent collaborator with Neil, has Bod dressed in clothes before Silas gives him clothes. Um, yeah, not meshing together and pulling me out of the book. Whereas Pelizzoli just dragged me further in the world of Elspeth.

Though I have a feeling this edition was more for admiring then reading. The paper stock is glossy, so it's hard to read in some lighting situations because the pages reflect the light. Also, the font is so small and the lines so long per page, it's easy to lose you place and makes it far longer to read. I'm a fast reader and I struggled with the book just for this reason. So, your paperback copy you have sitting on your shelf will serve you better for the daily readings, but if you ever see a copy of this at your local used bookstore, pick it up for your coffee table, it's beautiful and, well, it's about coffee too, so thematic with your table. A win win situation.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 4 comments  

Labels: Ashford April, Dave McKean, Elspeth Huxley, Frances Pelizzoli, Happy Valley, Kenya, Kikuyu, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lauren Willig, Little House, Masai, Neil Gaiman, The Flame Trees of Thika, The Graveyard Book, Ticks