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Published Date : 1969
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Please go to Paul Theroux.com's new site, Paul TherouxFree Computer Help Forum This novel, set in
the green chaos of East Africa, concerns the ambitions of three women,
teachers at a remote girls’ school. They are the only white women in
this region, and each is in her way doomed.
Miss Poole, the Headmistress, was born
in Africa and cannot live anywhere else. A colonial, she wants
desperately to order the society along Christian principles. But she
has little support in this. Her most intimate friend is Rose, an
African albino girl. Bettyjean Lebow -- B.J. to her friends -- an
American Peace Corps volunteer from San Diego, has other ideas; she
has come to help and can’t understand why the others “have this
thing about black people.” And yet she has difficulty reconciling
her Hollywood fantasies of Africa with her liberal outlook.
Heather Monkhouse, about whom much
is rumored, left a dull job in outer London to come to Africa, where
she hoped the loveless routine of her life would end. After being
fired from a teaching job in Nairobi, she arrives at Miss Poole’s and
creates a threatening mood of suspense, made worse by the hysteria all
the women feel in their loneliness. Trapped at the school, each
struggles to realize her own vision of Africa, and to survive.
During one school term, in an
isolation where the only willing men are two black cousins, Wangi and
Wilbur, the vision of each woman alters against her will, then is
destroyed. And the sardonic humor that characterizes the earlier
chapters explodes into a denouement of ferocious violence. |
