"Ronald an Nancy were, God knows why, married."
So begins this spellbinding novel of love, alienation, disillusionment, and redemption that evokes Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham at the height of their storytelling powers.Ronald Keane, married for no compelling reason to Dr. Nancy Applegate--a small, unbeautiful toxicologist who works in a pre-Independence West African country--arrives in Africa to find himself enrolled immediately in the toying, scarifying affections of Vivian Angle, the British High Commissioners feline wife. The situation is not original, the expatriate setting familiarly snug--yet from it Burda has wrung a brilliant, first-rate novel that is often reminiscent of the sort of classic British fiction epitomized by Fords The Good Soldier. When a cholera epidemic strikes upcountry, in Ndami, Nancy takes Ronald there with her (removing him from Vivians idle appetites). Feeling useless in a land of death, Ronald bustles about usefully, being very much the practical American in a situation that calls more for pity than ingenuity, while at the same time hastening Nancys death--the result of a petulant marital squabble about possible cholera infection from salad greens. After she dies, he returns to the Port--dazed, destructive, innocent--and is jerked about some more by Vivian. All this is told in the rich, astounded, grieving voice of Aaron Clinemark, an upriver Jewish gold-mine manager for a British firm; and Burdas only real flaw here is that, however compelling Clinemarks weaving of report, eavesdropping, and hearsay may be, you do wonder how he can know so much when he wasnt right there. Still, this is the sort of book you read with one hand over your mouth, appalled at the stupidity and human beauty of the characters; not once does it use the African setting as an italic, but leaves it instead as only the sharpened atmosphere around whats already a reckless dagger of a predicament. Welcome Clinemarks Tale: fiction at its most alert, modulated, subtle, and cruel, full of astounding insight, superb prose, and a great, horrified cradling of its characters, its children of error.