A
Spear of Summer Grass
By
Deanna Raybourn
Publisher:
Harlequin Mira
Release
Date: April 30, 2013
Delilah
Drummond is her mother’s daughter—an often-married socialite who excels at
spending money and flirting with scandal. But when Delilah’s most recent
husband commits suicide immediately after receiving divorce papers and Delilah,
who has maintained her own name, refuses to surrender the royal jewels that she
has inherited from the man who made her his widow before she could make him her
ex and refuses to adopt an appropriately remorseful attitude, the resulting
scandal reaches international proportions. There are rumors of an investigation
being opened, and her maternal grandfather in Louisiana is making noises about
cutting off all financial support. Delilah’s mother, her favorite former
step-father, and her lawyer and former husband #2 are in agreement that Delilah
must leave Paris.
Delilah
refuses to consider America where Prohibition is the law of the land, but she
has fond memories of the fascination her step-father’s African diary held for
her when she read it as a teenager. Thus, when he offers her Fairlight, the
home he built on the banks of Lake Wanyama, Delilah agrees to accept exile from
Europe. Two weeks later, accompanied by a distant Drummond cousin and poor
relation, Dora, or Dodo, Delilah sets sail on a British ship for Mombasa. The
dutiful, dull Dodo, whose two interests are God and gardens, will serve as a
combination chaperone and personal maid.
From
the moment of her arrival in Kenya, Delilah begins to learn just how different
Kenya is from the world she has left, and yet, strangely, some things remain
the same. The violence and beauty of the country leave her weak-kneed. She is
still in the Nairobi train station when she sees a man beaten so severely that
his blood splashes on her shoes, and before she arrives at Fairlight, she has
her forehead marked with the blood of a buffalo she helped to kill, signifying
“first African blood.” But her reputation has preceded her, and the lieutenant
governor, concerned that she might become involved in escapades that would
reflect badly on Kenya, insists that she cannot linger in Nairobi. She soon
finds old friends in the area and joins them in a lifestyle that, despite the
setting, is as hedonistic as the one she left in Paris.
Delilah
also finds that the nursing skills she acquired for service in World War I are
useful in this new environment, and she shocks and angers some by her humane
treatment of the Blacks in her employ. Through all of these experiences, there
is safari guide J. Ryder White, an arrogant, complex alpha with a core of
tenderness, who infuriates her, challenges her, and fascinates her. A part of
and yet distinct from the British expatriate community, Ryder proves to be a
“stayer,” the kind of man Delilah never expected to encounter again. But
Delilah must change before her heart is willing to accept that truth.
Raybourn
leaves her popular Lady Julia Gray series to give readers this standalone novel
that combines historical fiction with murder mystery and a substantial thread
of romance. Set amid the decadence of the wealthy in the1920s and three years
after Kenya had been declared a British crown colony, the story includes both
the sparkle and the darkness of the period. The racial conflicts between the
European colonials, the Africans, and the Indians are growing and shaping the
politics of the era, and the lavish lifestyle of the European community is a
stark contrast to the injustice and exploitation of colonialism. Raybourn uses
all of this history in the story of a woman who embodies its contradictions and
complexities.
I had
a really difficult time deciding how to “grade” this book. Deanna Raybourn is
an amazing writer, and her skills are evident from the opening line to the
final one. Her vivid descriptions of Kenya frequently made me feel as if I were
watching a movie on a theater screen rather than reading a book. That was the
effect of this description:
A tiny herd of elephants looked
infinitesimal from our lofty height, and when Ryder stilled the engine, I heard
nothing but the long rush of wind up from the valley floor. It carried with it
every promise of Africa, that wind. It smelled of green water and red earth and
the animals that roamed it. And there was something more, something old as the
rocks. It might have been the smell of the Almighty himself, and I knew there
were no words for this place. It was sacred, as no place I had ever been
before.
Her
prose is always beautifully lucid and often lyrical as well. When Delilah
arrives at Fairlight expecting to see the place she had imagined when she was a
child and finds instead a house falling apart, she expresses her disillusionment:
Of all emotions, disappointment
is the most difficult to hide. Rage, hatred, envy—those are easy to mask. But
disappointment strikes to the heart of the child within us, resurrecting every
unsatisfactory Christmas, every failed wish made on a shooting star.
The poignancy
of some passages is powerfully moving, as in this passage when Delilah responds
to Dodo's question about whether Delilah ever loved any of the men in her life
after her first husband:
You close your eyes and
suddenly he’s not there anymore. What you loved, or thought you loved, just
isn’t there, and there is a man-shaped hole in your memory of where he used to
be. The sad part is when it happens when he’s sitting at the same table or
lying in the same bed. You can turn and look at him and not even remember his
name because he was just a visitor. He was a man who was only passing through
your heart, and you never really made a place for him, so he just keeps
passing. My husbands since Johnny have been passing men. Not a stayer among
them.
At the
other end of the emotional spectrum are tiny details that left me with a
delighted smile, details such as Delilah’s car, a lipstick-red Hispano-Suiza
with leopard upholstery that seems perfect for her and also evoked images of
the Hispano-Suiza in P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle short stories and
novels and the book, Fordyce’s Sermons,
which Delilah had to balance on her head when learning to walk like a lady. (Fordyce’s Sermons is the 1767 guidebook
to female conduct from which Mr. Collins read to the Bennet sisters in Jane
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.)
In the
con column is a heroine I could not like. Delilah is at times entertaining, she
is more rarely sympathetic, and she is always interesting, but she is also, for
much of the book, selfish, shallow, and amoral. She treats her cousin with
condescension some times and with careless cruelty at other times. When she
spends her last night in Paris with former husband #2, a married man with two
young children, she thinks she may even be rendering a service to his wife
since he’s jollier after sex with Delilah and the guilt over his infidelity
leads him to purchase an expensive present for his wife. The list of her
offenses that the lieutenant governor in Nairobi names include “stealing a car
outside a Harlem nightclub and driving it into the Hudson” and being “caught in flagrante with a judge’s
eighteen-year-old son in Dallas.”
Granted Delilah changes, but by that time, I disliked so many things
about her that I could not feel any real connection with her. I’m not a reader
who needs to identify with the heroine, but I do, especially with the intimacy
between character and reader that comes with a first person point of view, need
to like her.
If the
vivid evocation of time and place, an atypical heroine and hero, and wonderful
prose are sufficient to make you love a book, you may be one of the readers
giving A Spear of Summer Grass high
marks. If likeable characters are a prime criterion for you, you may, as I did,
have mixed reactions to this novel.
~Janga
http://justjanga.blogspot.com
~Janga
http://justjanga.blogspot.com
Likeable characters are a MUST for me, Janga, and I appreciate your honest review!
ReplyDeleteLove the review. Would love to read and reiew. jrs362 at hotmail dot com
ReplyDeleteI agree about needing to like a character. This was a great review :)
ReplyDelete