Customer Reviews

Ahmed's Revenge: A Novel

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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.

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.

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."

I came to Ahmed's Revenge quite prepared to love this book; I admire Wiley's choice of settings and subjects for his books and a review whet my appetite. The beginning is most promising; the story reads as if Wiley worked pretty hard on getting the first 40 or 50 pages right. Then it is like he ran out of time or interest and rushed through the rest. The bulk of the book reads too much, for a writer of Wiley's ability and pedigree, like a first draft. There are loose ends and dead ends and repeated ideas and wooden stage directions. People's reactions don't ring true. The narrator is breathless and racing about but despite her protestations I do not buy that she is a grieving recent widow, I don't buy the emotions she says she's feeling. Some interesting characters crop up and there are some nice passages but it is very uneven. The sudden (and very convenient) friendship that develops with the opera singer is particularly unconvincing and inorganic to the story. The follow through on the mystery is a bit weak. The sheer story telling is not at all sure or strong. Again, much of seems like first draft material that should have been revised if not dropped. I am sorry to find this book to be so thin.

This clumsy novel reads like a rough draft that a good editor should have polished and tightened. The detective/narrator, Nora, is a buffoon who constantly hampers the mystery she is allegedly solving. The suspense never works. Why would Nora, hot on the trail of a bad guy, interrupt to tell him she's running late, just when he's trying to let her in on a clue? (When she's finally ready to hear, he won't tell.) This book teeters between the conventions of a mystery and the conventions of a novel desperately seeking a deeper meaning. It succeeds on neither level. For a marvelous Kenya setting read Francesca Marciano's "Rules of the Wild" or even go back to Karen Blixen's "Out of Africa." For authentically-menacing African politics read Nadine Gordimer or V. S. Naipaul. The only people who should read this turkey are those who want to use it as a textbook for Creative Writing 101: How Not to Write.