Krishna
Wow! Easily one of the very best books I have read.
This book tells the story of Nathan Price, who is a zealous evangelist who wants to convert the whole of Africa to Christianity and redeem them from their pagan ways. He takes his wife Orleanna, and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah and Mary Rose to Congo. He settles down in a place called Katanga, a small village of a few people on the edge of the forest.
The place is populated by a lot of local people who have individual characteristics, and by Eeben Axelroot, who is involved in everything from smuggling, to political plotting. The village chief Tata Ndu proves hard to convert.
Each of the child has a characteristic which comes out when she tells part of the story. Rachel the airhead, who never accepted life in Congo; Leah the idealistic and practical; Adah, a brilliant mind trapped in a crooked body, and a twin of Leah; and Mary Ruth, the baby of the family. Nathan rules the household with an iron hand, suppressing deviation in any tiny form from the high ideals.
The travails of the family is heartrending; Through it all runs a little thread of humour, irony, and even good-natured mild blasphemy, only to highlight the complete absence of good sense or impracticality of the impossibly high ideals of the father. The story is told in pieces by each child, and in telling, a remarkable transformation takes place in the style of narration according to the personality of the narrator.
Mary Ruth falls victim to the inherent dangers of the place they live in, and that is the point when the family breaks up,
irrevocably. The family has by then gone through the adventures of an encounter with the ferocious fire ants, and a proposal by Chief Tata Ndu to marry Rachel. The history of Congo is intertwined in the background, with the ascent and subsequent murder of Patric Lumumba, the first President of independent Congo and the ascent of Mobutu to the top.
The story is brilliantly told, but, in my opinion, should have ended much before it actually did, at the first chapter of Exodus. The tracing of the later adventures make the story sag a lot. And the description of the politics later comes across as overly partisan (heavily laced with antiglobalization preaching and the pet rants of the author), and the fabled detachment shown in the early part by the author gets frayed. The preaching tone jars on the nerves. But the first part of the story makes up for all the lapses and is an amazing read. I would place it on par with the Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (reviewed earlier).
I could have awarded my first 10 for this, but due to the fact that there is extra unwarranted appendage at the end (in my view), let us say a 9/10.
— Krishna