Badly behaved Brit bwanas
A tale of expatriate toffs running wild in Kenya doesn’t ring true.
Novelists set themselves a tricky problem when they make a child or adolescent their central character, and then have the kid observing illicit adult sexual behaviour. It isn’t just the unlikeliness of kids seeing such things in detail, but the equal unlikeliness of adults talking to them about it.
Henry James got away with it in What Maisie Knew. So did LP Hartley in The Go-Between. Way back in 1954, the New Zealand novelist James Courage almost managed it in The Young Have Secrets. But when Kat Gordon tries it in The Hunters, she comes an awful cropper.
Fourteen-year-old Theo Miller, the novel’s first-person narrator, comes to Kenya in the 1920s. Although his parents are straight-laced and respectable, young Theo is soon being invited on outings by the raffish Freddie Hamilton, Earl of Caithness, and his American mistress Sylvie, who is married to a French count. Freddie and Sylvie are part of Kenya’s “Happy Valley” set – those hedonistic, mainly aristocratic British settlers who passed their time boozing, snorting cocaine, holding orgies and shagging one another’s spouses.
It’s never explained why Theo’s upright parents so easily let the kid get involved,
especially as they know what sort of people Freddie and Sylvie are. It’s also never explained why the orgiasts want the kid around, and especially why they want to discuss their affairs with him.
This strikes a completely false note throughout the first part of the novel. Theo’s mooncalf love for Sylvie is credible, but he is mainly an unbelievable character and he remains so in the later chapters when he is a young man in his twenties.
Ostensibly, we are invited to deplore the hedonism of the settlers and their casual racism. At the same time, we are covertly
The “Happy Valley” set pass the time snorting cocaine and shagging one another’s spouses.
invited to enjoy all the goss and envy their affluence and style.
Theo’s sister Maud becomes the obvious voice of liberal sensibilities in siding with the Africans. Freddie is gradually revealed to be a rotter as he mistreats a string of mistresses, joins the British Union of Fascists and helps his second wife to her death by encouraging her heroin addiction. A number of characters are fictitious versions of real people. Freddie is clearly based on Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, wife-beater, fascist and serial philanderer, whose murder in 1941 brought “Happy Valley” to the world’s attention. Freddie comes to a sticky end too, but Gordon moves the event back to the mid-1930s and makes the circumstances quite different.
Some readers may enjoy this in a Downton Abbey sort of way (feel superior to the retro attitudes but love the costumes, for example). I closed it loathing these colonial nitwits, even the ones we’re meant to like, and wishing only that the Kenyan push for independence had
come 20 years earlier.