To Africa's graven pagan face was the holy book remade and it was sacrilegiously, spectacularly successful. The book is as primevally (prime evilly in Rachel's broken-down vocabulary) lyrical and robust as most people's instinctive idea of the dark continent.
Yet it holds within it the strong moral temper of an Hawthornian novel, as one reviewer puts it, especially spoken through the character of Leah, the author's mouthpiece for certain political sympathies that would have sunk this novel like a rock if she was allowed any more space than the fourth or a fifth of a book that she was given.
Her twin sister Adah, the former idiot savant and droll philosopher of the brood, was closer to the real spirit of the novel and perhaps, to the author's own deepest inclinations. She has by far, the most memorable opening salvo in the novel, to my mind, to wit: "Sunrise tantalize, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo pink. Any morning, every morning."
That is one of the most concise and imaginative verbal sketching of character I have ever encountered in recent readings. To quote one of the book's most memorable imageries, it's like the eyes inside the tree describing the inside of the tree.
The author was a lot more self-conscious with Rachel, the "dumb blonde" of the brood. Maybe because she herself isn't. The fact that I can pin down this character with the withered strength of a cliche says a lot about how much of a shell she is compared with her red-blooded sisters and even mother who by the way got to be on that stage to act out their heroic issues with the dark continent because of an interesting little trivia which catapulted the story.
Their father, the half-crazed Baptist preacher, was in everlasting atonement for having been spared from the Death March in Bataan during WWII by an act of self-preservation variously interpreted as cowardice. So he is trying to cleanse this instance of moral filth from the muddy banks of Africa's Congo river by proxy, vowing to baptize as many of the dark children as he could, an act interpreted by the locals as a sacrificial offering to the crocodiles and which subsequently cost him his life after that stain of sin in these isles (the Philippine isles) proved uncommonly resistant to the soap of forgiveness, even one self-directed.
There are many such instances of humor, dark as the continent itself, in this book. One of my favorites were the episodes with Methuselah, the African parrot and inherited house pet too eloquent for his own good. He is at once a piece of intransigent Africa and his hapless demise in the jaws of a wild animal a foreshadowing of a greater tragedy that would serve as fulcrum for the last third part of the novel.
This last one went without closure. It is the continent again slipping from the grasp of a bunch of women with the same complexion as its Belgian, French, Portuguese conquerors in the distant past and the Cold War partisans who maintained their local puppet petty despots. Sounds familiar.
