Ahmed's Revenge: A Novel [Hardcover]

Richard Wiley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 1998

The people in Richard Wiley's fiction live in the dangerous territory where cultures and worlds collide. In Soldiers in Hiding, for which Richard Wiley won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction in 1987, the protagonist was Teddy Maki, a Japanese-American whose jazz band was playing in Tokyo at the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Now, in his new novel, Ahmed's Revenge, Wiley introduces us to Nora Grant, a young coffee farmer living in Kenya in the 1970s, a woman whose predicament is less obvious than Maki's but no less dangerous.
        Nora has disbelievingly stumbled upon her husband, Julius, engaged in what appears to be ivory smuggling, one of the Europeans' dirtiest games. Before Nora can confront Julius, he is killed in accidental circumstances that soon look more like murder. Nora investigates her husband's affairs, coming across a        succession of people whose lives intertwine and intersect: her own father, living out his    retirement in England in apparent innocence; Mr Smith, who might be a murderer; Mr N'Chele, who might be a smuggler; Miro, the opera singer; Detective Mubia, a policeman of         divided loyalties--and Ahmed, a massive African elephant, whose remains are preserved at the National Museum in Nairobi and in whose name revenge must be sought.
        Richard Wiley is a craftsman. His eclectic cast of misfits plays out an engaging story  in a superbly wrought atmosphere of post-    colonial tension and drama.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"I had a farm in Africa, too."

Readers familiar with Isak Dinesen's classic memoir of colonial life in Africa, Out of Africa, will instantly recognize Richard Wiley's witty riff on its famous first line at the beginning of Ahmed's Revenge. Like Dinesen, narrator Nora Grant is a white woman living on a coffee ranch in Kenya; like her, Grant's husband is shot in the second chapter of this fictional "memoir," but there the similarities end, and Wiley takes off on a wild ride through the cutthroat world of ivory poachers and international smugglers. Set in the early 1970s, Ahmed's Revenge is Nora's account of her husband's murder and her own subsequent investigation into it. Born in Kenya, Nora had left Africa for London, where she met and married Julius. When he suggests they return to Kenya and make a go of coffee farming, she agrees, and for a time they are successful. Then Julius is killed and Nora discovers he was in league with ivory smugglers. As she begins to look into her husband's shady dealings, Nora uncovers more than she'd bargained for: not only was Julius involved in the illegal ivory trade, but her father, once a minister of wildlife in the Kenyan government, was, too.

The plot alone would make Ahmed's Revenge a compelling read, but Wiley isn't content just to deliver a mystery. As Nora delves into the truth behind her husband's death, Wiley serves up a disquieting meditation on issues of race, culture, and national identity. A note to the worried: Ahmed's Revenge is not the Kenyan version of that well-known retribution against careless tourists taken by Montezuma; it is a reference to a giant elephant whose skeleton graces the National Museum in Nairobi. It seems only appropriate that his bones serve as the frame around which Wiley builds his fascinating, unpredictable novel.

From Publishers Weekly

After she happens to see her husband, Julius, enter what appears to be a smuggler's warehouse full of elephant tusks, Anglo-Kenyan coffee farmer Nora GrantAthe heroine of this unpredictable and absorbing whodunit set in 1970s KenyaAwonders how well she knows him. The question grows harder to answer when Julius is attacked on the plantation by a lioness, then suddenly dies in the hospital, even though recovery seemed certain. Was he murdered? Was English-born Julius resented by the Kenyans as an expatriate interloper? Was his real business in illegal ivory, not coffee? As Nora probes the circumstances surrounding Julius's death, she finds herself forming uneasy alliances with various deftly limned characters: charismatic opera singer Miro; the Maasai servant Kamau, who seems to have turned against the Grants; the courtly Mr. N'Chele and his duplicitous, vitriolic son, "Mr. Smith"; and her own father, his mind fogged by senility but not perhaps entirely free of amoral self-interest or racism. The mystery plot sometimes hampers PEN/Faulkner winner Wiley's larger investigations into the alliances and enmitiesAbetween African and Englishman, bureaucrat and farmerAthat animate modern Kenya. Yet Wiley (Indigo) writes with a vividly pictorial eye and evokes the burgeoning sophistication of Nairobi, as well as the wilderness forever tearing at its boundaries. Monkeys pelting Nora with rotten avocados, a vast wooden box containing what seem to be the tusks of the elephant Ahmed; another wooden box with a severed arm; Nora walking through the dusk with a lion's heart bloodying her handsAsuch inventive imagery pervades the book, illuminating the moral and cultural questions at its heart.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (June 16, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679457445
• ISBN-13: 978-0679457442
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,560,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ahmed's Revenge..., March 25, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Ahmed's Revenge: A Novel (Hardcover)

Wiley escapes limited genre assignments with this novel which embraces so many themes. It is entertaining and surprisingly humorous in areas; it touches on class,race,and gender issues. His success is in crafting an intricate and engaging story which races the audience through political and social commentary that is subtle, and so more effective. The language is often beautiful and the backdrop is sensual. This is literature that offers a counter-history in the form of a personal memoir. I loved it; I read it in one day.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Elephants in "Ahmed's Revenge", September 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Ahmed's Revenge: A Novel (Hardcover)

Richard Wiley's "Ahmed's Revenge" is a curiously interesting book. I have liked all of Wiley's novels; this one is the most puzzling. We are dealing with situations and characters that are unfamiliar that Wiley has rendered as both familiar and exotic. I read this one with my forehead furrowed, trying to work out all the problems and complications it occasioned in my weary brain. The quiet tone and unexpected imagery has a bit of a pleasant hypnotic effect. It's a curious book, and you ought to look at it yourself and add a book review of your responses so I can read them too. My primary suggestion for the author is to add more elephants. And more digging.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, panoramic novel of Kenya's illegal ivory trade, September 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Ahmed's Revenge: A Novel (Hardcover)

Richard Wiley's novel about a young British widow caught in Kenya's illegal ivory trade is beautifully rendered. His fifth novel, Wiley's hallmarks of unusually graceful prose and a narrative style driven by eccentric characters from different parts of the world who are drawn together by mutual dependence and everyday happenstance are gloriously present in this tale of intrigue and cultural collision. Nora Grant is a lifelong British resident of Kenya in her early thirties, living on and running a coffee farm with her husband, Jules. She is shocked to discover his involvement in the illegal trade of elephant tusks. But before she summons the will to confront him, Jules is severely injured in a shooting accident. When he dies mysteriously while in hospital, Nora resolves to get to the root of his illicit legacy. She does so with the aid of her increasingly senile father; her father's best friend, an elderly and detached physician; a down-at-the-heels city detective, dedicated and insightful, yet curiously incapable of a normal conversational greeting ("Jambo Mama and Daddy."); and a beautiful African opera singer preparing for her role in Madame Butterfly. The story line is filled with unexpected turns taken by flawed heroes and not-so-evil villains, colorfully fleshed out by this one-time expatriate author, who lived and worked in Kenya, as well as several other countries. Through it all is the lakewater clear quality of Wiley's prose, exempified in passages like this one, as Nora reflects on the nature of her relationship with Jules. "...it was nevertheless I who fell in love first and hardest, I who most clearly heard that inner whisper telling me that Jules was the one. I believe now that Jules loved me during his life, ...but he loved the idea of Africa, the idea of high savannah, of elephants on the open range, at least as well."