Striking Poses and Skimming the Surface of Deep Africa

“A woman of enormous personal charisma,” the publisher’s press release calls Francesca Marciano. Reviewers have little reason to cite press releases, but there seems to be no way to write about “Rules of the Wild” without quoting its publicity. Authors’ publicity is what the book is about. In this novel of sex among white expatriates in Kenya--Vanity Fair meets Isak Dinesen--Marciano employs Africa as a fashion mirror to strike fetching writerly poses.

To sum up as tightly as possible: Esme, daughter of Ferdinando, a great Italian poet, goes on a luxury safari in Africa to rid herself of depression after the death of a father who looked like “an aging medieval knight” and possessed “the eyes of a falcon.” Thirty elephants in the rain tilt the balance against the falcon. Esme resolves to make a deep commitment to Africa, forsaking her frivolous, bacon-eating safari companions.

Deep Africa, for the moment, is represented by the safari guide, a second-generation Anglo expatriate. Adam loves the wilderness, and he is an expert at tracking wildlife and organizing the elaborate gear required by rich tourists (on his annual client tours in the United States he shows slides of the safari plumbing). Esme spends hours admiring his musculature as he tinkers with his Land Rover. They go to bed. “His voice was like velvet in the semi-dark.” Also he smelled good.

Living with Adam, solicitous and caring though busy, makes Esme feel safe but also restless. When he is away, she is thrown into the company of the Nairobi expatriate community: self-indulgent, gossipy, druggy, promiscuous and quite removed from the lives of the Kenyans. Unfulfilled--particularly after she has a miscarriage--she is attracted to Hunter, an ultraconcerned journalist who writes about the continent’s wars, massacres and wretched poverty.

Marciano seeks to set up a contrast between two kinds of engagement with Africa. There is Adam’s prelapsarian romance with the place, all lyrical landscape, wildlife and dignified tribesmen. There is Hunter’s squalid present-day reality. He comes back from the wars in Somalia and Rwanda in a state of grim despair.

Esme wavers between the two men and their rival visions. She formulates simplistic social commentaries between bouts of tumescence; her sessions with Hunter are rendered in prose as steamily hazy as those with Adam. Marciano, a documentary filmmaker, makes vehement passes at sex and other emotions, but is unable to convey their particularity. She produces the rhetoric of emotion, not emotion itself. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: Attitudes aren’t literature.

The author, who lives in Rome and Kenya and whose protagonist is to some degree based on herself, has a lot to say about whites in Africa, none of it original and most of it obvious. “This is a country of space and yet we all live in a tiny microcosm [are there large ones?] to protect ourselves from it,” she writes.

Her description of the constricted social rituals among the expatriates is up-to-date and journalistically plausible, though marred, again, by rhetorical devices: for instance, an insistent comparison with baboon packs. What it lacks is virtually any wit or humor. A portrait that in the absence of genuine novelistic engagement might have done as satire emerges as soft-core existential rant.

As for Africa itself, Marciano does best with the landscape, the light, the sky; a reflection, no doubt, of a filmmaker’s talents. Mostly, they are not a writer’s talents. Apart from passages that it would be a cruelty to quote--or is it a cruelty to the prospective reader not to?--there is the muddiness of the characters. The expatriate party set is a chorus of predictable roles. More serious is the failure to make Adam anything other than a decently reassuring icon of male prowess, and Hunter anything but a chilly, insufferably righteous journalist.

Esme’s erotic dilemma hangs, accordingly, not from twin horns, but twin smudges. Smudgiest of all is Esme herself. At the end, momentarily bereft of romance--though a third lover looms--she resolves to go back to her African life. Readers may wonder what it is she is going back to: All we have seen of it is a little landscape and a great many cliches.

At one point, when Esme asks Hunter about his love affairs in Britain, he replies: “London is full of girls with very exciting lingerie and very boring minds.” It is the best line in the book; unluckily it pretty much describes the book. Even there it will depend on your underwear excitement level.