Customer Reviews

The Consul's Wife

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Tyler obviously spent time as a Foreign Service Officer. Having spent several years in Africa in the FS as well, this book brought back many memories and yearnings to return. Once Africa gets under your skin, there is an indescibable yearning to return. I was particularly captured in the first two pages of the book with his description of the storm and the magic. I could almost hear the Wood Dove in the background and the crack of lightening against the granite kopjes. From an old AF hand, an excellent read, written by someone who really experienced it and understood.

This portrait of a young, single US foreign service officer serving in pre civil-war Lebanon, the Congo, and then just pre-civil war Sudan is dead on in capturing a certain type. Tyler served in the foreign service himself (a milieu I grew up in), and his description of the diplomatic life is perhaps the best I've read. Most of the book is spent in the Congo, and Tyler does an excellent job showing how Hugh Mathews is totally affected by his travels through the back country. He is outsider to the stuffy suited men who mostly stay in within the safe confines of embassy life. His life is given meaning through a frenetic affair with the wife of the embassy's consul. When she leaves, he drifts through a few empty years in Sudan and Washington, going through the motions. He gains a second chance at the end, with plausibly subdued results. It all rings very very true and is presented in well-crafted prose.

I currently live in Africa and have spent time here during two tours in the foreign service. I found this book extremely disappointing. Try as I might, I never actually liked any of the characters, least of all the protagonist. Tyler never actually permits any of this characters to undergo development; the moment you meet them they are automatically tarred with whatever brush he paints them with and in a paragraph or less we know the failures, character flaws and shortcomings of a particular player. There are times when Tyler paints a beautiful picture of the African bush with his words, but most often he focuses on Mathews' thoughts, which hold him derisively above the entire supporting cast of the book, with the exception of the object of his affection. In my experience, embassy life is a bit more complex, and people who are in the foreign service even more so - making an outright judgement is not only incorrect, but in a book quite uninteresting, especially when it's not undone in a surprise twist or even questioned.

Billing it as a love story confused me too. You never really get a sense of affection between Mathews and Blakey. Mathews is the Ultimate User in behavior and his love and desperation to keep her at the end came on too quickly and was something I found unbelievable. Tyler foists the "emancipation myth" stereotype on Blakey, but I really struggled to understand that in the context of what came across as a very cold relationship of convenience in most of the writing.

I was excited to find a book on Embassy life - they can be too few and far between - but I would not recommend this to anyone as an accurate account or even an interesting novel.