Haunting story illuminates East Africa
To the world, Rebecca Laurelson, narrator of The Dhow House, is a serious and sensitive doctor who sets bones and stitches ruptured bodies in a dusty field hospital in East Africa. But Rebecca has a secret. She has been recruited by British intelligence to report on the progress of a militant Islamic group terrorizing the country.
She uses medical terminology as code: “Carotid artery presents oxygenated blood flow,” means that Al-Nur insurgents are advancing from the interior.
This is not her first job in a war zone — she’s worked in Afghanistan and Kurdistan — though it’s her first as an informer. And she may be good at it, possessing “a talent for emotional quarantine, a cultural knack for treachery.”
Author Jean McNeil, raised in Nova Scotia but now living in England, has also lived in East Africa. The great joy in The Dhow House, her eleventh book, is her exceptional ability to illuminate setting and the natural world. Rebecca studies birding, an extension of her role as a watcher.
As the novel opens, Rebecca has left her desert posting to recuperate — she won’t say what’s happened — with her aunt and her family, whom she doesn’t know, but live nearby on the coast. If they lived in England they would be ordinary, but behind their walled compounds along the Indian Ocean, they took on the “sheen of demigods.” How her uncle makes his money is not clear — businesses are mysteriously entangled — though Rebecca has read intelligence files on him
The tension is immediate. They are family, but eye each other with coolness and suspicion. Rebecca falls in love with her much younger cousin, Storm, but their affair is strange and hidden.
With elections looming and the threat of violence, Rebecca’s purpose is shadowy — is it to report or to recover? This duality has many threads: the place of the “lost tribe” of white people in a black Africa, the healer who may also betray, the beautiful lover with a skeletal heart, the loyalty to family who are really strangers.
Rebecca must discover the “exact grain” of her soul. Is she a good person, or a bad one? None of this is revealed in linear storytelling. The plot moves back and forth in time, the narrator’s voice changes and some rereading is necessary. Yet, the effect is haunting. Though sometimes overwrought, McNeil’s writing is as lush and vivid as the changing hues of the Indian Ocean.
While the reader may at times feel bewildered, the sense of place and insight into the mysterious inclinations of the heart linger long after the last page. Leslie Scrivener is a Toronto writer.