Customer Reviews

Rules of the Wild: A Novel of Africa

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I read this book in one sitting and promptly passed it around my circle of friends. Here's my insights on who will like it:

The fact that it is a romance means it will appeal (quite strongly) to women, and not very much to men. All my female friends adored it; none of my male friends managed to finish it.

It is not an African current affairs book and should not be read for any socio-political message - except what you might interpret from the attitudes of the characters. Mainly, it is a personal story, nothing else.

This book appeals to those who have lived as an expat and to those who dream of adventure in far off lands. Written by an Italian, it is an example of the modern European mentality toward living abroad - which is very different from the American psyche. The foreignness of the author's mentality causes it to lose some appeal to the American audience. My European friends who have lived in Africa all identified completely with this book. The fact that it is currently a top ten bestseller in South Africa also points to its readership.

If you liked this novel, there's a newer book called The Africa House by Christina Lamb (available through Amazon UK) that appeals to a similar audience.

As an expatriate American who was born and raised in Kenya and attended the British boarding schools in Kenya, I can honestly say that I saw the people I grew up in this book. I first read it in 1998, when it came out; I was in the States for the first time and homesick for Kenya. When I read this book, it was as though I was home again. Esme's descriptions of Kenya evoke memories of home; once you fall in love with Africa, nothing else will ever seem quite good enough.

I just read some of the other reviews written about this novel and I am saddened to see people take things so personally. Francesca Marciano penned a superb novel about expats in Kenya. Anyone who paid attention to the jacket of the book would have known that. For people to have bought this book and expected anything else, is sad. Yes the characters are narcissistic and yes they are shallow, but that was entirely the point. As an African, I have had many run ins with such people and anyone who has (and some who haven't), know that Ms. Marciano's version of expatriates in Africa, is incredibly accurate. Her handle of the English language is fabulous and her characters are interesting and intentionally lacking in substance. She vividly portrays the landscape and left me with a longing that I haven't felt in quite some time. I was transported to Kenya and felt the beauty of the land in the same way that the characters did. I reccommend this novel to anyone who knows how not to take life to seriously and how to see the flaws in others for what they are.

Marciano has given us a spare, beautiful book about people. While much time can and should be spent discussing the main character, Esme, and her relationship with Africa, I found the most intriguing and forceful element of the book to be the people and tight-knit, highly cliquish society described. I found myself both horrified and excited by the dangerous relationships, the way sexual partners are often changing hands, the way friends love each other and leave each other. The book is worth reading for an exploration of these relationships, as well as the prose and the imagery of the Kenyan wilderness. I recommend it with a disclaimer to be forwarned that the reader may not enjoy the character of Esme at all.

Esme meets Africa for the first time largely by fluke. She finds much to love and hate, but in time, her lover settles under her skin.

In this crisp, fluid novel, Marciano brings us into the lives and hearts of the contemporary white community in Kenya. She offers an accurate, if cynical, lens into its comforts, conflicts and uneasy contact with the larger community.

Through her deft use of metaphor and down-to-earth dialogue, Marciano evokes a rare intimacy with her superficial, self-absorbed but earnestly-portrayed characters. She also uses vivid imagery in describing the landscape of Kenya and strong specificity in her setting - from Yaya shopping center to the midnight BA flight and Omo detergent - and comes across as one who really knows Esme's Kenya.

Although Ms. Marciano has a way with a phrase here and there, this book is irritating in its pseudo-political correctness. While her character rails against the First-Worlders who never bother to learn anything about their African neighbors, she herself limits most of the reader's contact with them to servants and "wise natives" who work on her car! The main characters are trite and two-dimensional...oh...and don't forget incredibly beautiful and endowed with talents I never quite learned to appreciate! Who would want to know any of these people...longer than the one-night stand, at any rate??

Vacuous white people prancing across an African landscape. And it gets boring very quickly. If you're looking for insight into the human condition (isn't that why we read fiction?), forget it. We don't even get insight into the annoying and shallow stick figures that the author tries to pass off as characters. Not for a moment did I ever care about one of them.

If you're interested at all in white people in Africa, read Peter Godwin's "Mukiwa: A white Boy in Africa." It's non fiction; witty, charming, insightful, entertaining, and you'll feel that you learned something.

I want the few hours of my life that I spent reading this book back! If good fiction is equal parts description & dialogue, this is certainly neither. This novel takes place in Africa, but it may as well have been a generic backyard in New Jersey. There are no stunning descriptive details here. The main character, Esme, may as well be one of the Heathers from the movie of the same name. Esme's entire worldview is based on judging people's style of dress and sizing them up depending on whether she wants to sleep with them, prevent them with sleeping with her catch, or deciding whether they are chic enough to talk to. The character has no existence except in relation to the man she is sleeping with. The only action that defines her, other than smoking and drinking,is having sex. In fact, the book's division into the names of two main men, Adam and Hunter, demonstrates that her use value in the world only happens when annexed to a guy. Esme has nothing to offer: no personality, no intelligence (although she believes herself to be so saavy), no job, no skills- just an inheritance and a willingness to bed anything not wearing Dockers. I have never disliked a main character more; she is utterly without redeaming features, or any features really.
Please do not waste your time on this unless you like supermarket fantasy books or have a penchant for the pouty, spoiled little rich girl writer-hack type. Oh, it's so difficult being wealthy, unemployed and bored! This is a horrid novel.

I agree with reviewers who didn't like the character of Esme, in part because I felt the author simply didn't make her real enough. Marciano keeps telling us what an extraordinary woman Esme is, how she's "different from everyone else," but I couldn't see that at all. If anything, Esme comes across unintentionally as a hypocrite; she (and Marciano) is absurdly judgmental about the crass, shallow tourists who simply can't see the beauty of Africa the way she can, and merely want to get it all on film before they hurry back home. But it is midway through the book before Esme offhandedly "realizes" that maybe the only reason she is able to explore this beauty full-time is because she doesn't have to work for a living! Also, she criticizes others for keeping distance from black Africans and not caring about their plight, but when she meets Hunter for their visit to the black slums, she puts on a pretty dress to allure him without giving a single thought to their grim mission. (Admittedly, she eventually sees the irony in that situation, but it still doesn't show me how Hunter can possibly see Esme as being so "different." While he agonizes over the horrors of Rwanda, she agonizes over the fact that he talks about those horrors as though talking to himself, and not to her.) This weakened every aspect of the book because I couldn't take Esme seriously as a "reliable narrator." The other characters are similarly flat, as many readers have pointed out.

Despite all this, I still recommend the book. Marciano clearly knows her subject, and while it seemed at times derivative of Normal Rush's "Mating" (even though the two novels cover very different grounds and "Mating" is far superior) as well as other books mentioned by reviewers, it is still an entertaining read by itself. At its best, it will make you want to read more about Africa (though perhaps from authors with more refined skills).

"Rules of the Wild" is a story of love, lust, sex, mating practices, and sexual politics among Kenya's Wazungu tribe in the 1990's. The action takes place in and around Karen, but this isn't Blixen's Africa. The novel's tone is on the ironic, cynical, and jaded side, but one suspects there is a lot of truth here. The privileged, self-obsessed, always-outsider Wazungu are not easy to like, but they seem to be in keeping with the apparently deserved reputation for decadence among the ex-pat community in "Happy Valley". (see: "White Mischief" by James Fox). As with most fiction (by white authors) set in Africa, Africans play a small supporting role, but this is the only novel I know of that asks, Why? This is a romance set in Africa, but it's a romance the way Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter" is a western. It takes the conventions and forces them through the ringer; the characters themselves in "Rules of the Wild" react against the ("Out of) Africa(") that was (or never was). Kenya's natural wonders and human tragedies are well described, but the real story here, also well written, is emotional as the narrator struggles to understand her world and her self. This isn't for everyone, but I suspect most people under-40 will enjoy this novel.