Colourful evocations of Africa in haunting novel
THIS slow meditative novel takes a long time to get going – as elusive as its protagonist, Rebecca Laurelson, an English doctor, who wavers in and out of view, before the mystery of her presence in Africa is revealed.
She is on enforced leave from her position as a doctor in an East African country at war with itself, the tension fanning out even to a peaceful enclave on the coast.
It’s here that she takes refuge with long-lost family, an aunt she has only met briefly as a child, an uncle and her two young cousins edging into early adulthood, while Rebecca is in her late thirties. Revelling in the lush beauty of the coast, the house without a lounge wall with views that take in the Indian Ocean, Rebecca is haunted by memories of her work in a refugee camp, and a vein of unease runs through her. All is not what it appears to be – both within Rebecca and within a country teetering on the edge of what could be an impending disaster.
And then there’s her growing attraction to her male cousin, Storm, far too young for her; an attraction that can only spell further disaster, of course. And yet, sometimes, there is no stopping the falling into the void.
McNeil writes movingly of the experience of love, attraction and desire: “Unconscious love was like being shot through into a different dimension. Here the world was fascinatingly altered.” And: “How kissing was not an exchange of tongues and saliva at all, but a rummaging in each other’s souls.”
McNeil brings the lush heat of Africa to life – and the continent is an alive, pulsing presence in this book, its politics and landscape startlingly vivid and evoked: “The road was a constant theatre. Now a young man wearing a red T-shirt walked down the road with a blackand-white goat slung across his shoulders like a fur stole… A young man approached them wearing a silver lamé suit and a gangster fedora.”
While I enjoyed reading McNeil’s colourful evocations of Africa, and whites in Africa futilely clinging to old lives of indolence while change surges forward, I found Rebecca’s motives and character remained frustratingly hidden.
Her writing is haunting, however, beguiling in its beauty, which keeps you reading on.