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. |
