The Darling

I've never wanted to visit Africa. As a child I was petrified by movies about African jungles with their snakes, huge insects and carniverous animals, to say nothing of natives cooking missionaries in pots (shades of Mel Lastman!). Russell Banks' The Darling does nothing to change my opinion. Liberia is a sweltering hell hole whose smells and sounds are described in vivid and often horrific detail.
The protagonist, Hannah, is spoiled and self indulgent but altogether believable. Her life is compartmentalized like a series of loosely connected railway cars. She changes names and lives like others change vehicles.
Her childhood was one of privelege. The character of her father seems based on pediatrician Benjamin Spock who was prominent in the American anti-war movement (read Mailer's Armies of the Night). Her mother lives to serve him. Hannah, like many young people, resents her parents for trivial reasons: dad accidentally runs over her dog, they don't write to her or their letters are irritatingly worded, her mother is superficial, her father removed, etc. Hannah seems inordinately piqued by their shortcomings until, faced with their deaths, she reconciles her feelings.
Once in college she becomes involved in the civil rights movement and the Weather Underground. After some botched bombings she becomes a fugitive living in safe houses. She ends up in Africa where she marries a Liberian government minister and becomes a dutiful, if distant, wife and mother to three boys, reprising, to an extent, the role of her own mother. She sets up a chimpanzee refuge and finds this work emotionally rewarding. Indeed she seems to bond more strongly with the chimps (who she calls "dreamers") than to her own family.
Set against the brutal backdrop of a Liberian revolution the story devolves into tragedy. She witnesses the savage execution of her husband, the disappearance of her three sons and the killing of her beloved dreamers before she is forced to flee to the US. Once there she begins another new life as a landowner/ farmer in the Adirondacks and it is from this vantage point that she narrates her story. The one false note in the novel is the prison break she masterminds, setting a series of events in motion.
I was drawn in and engaged. We learn a lot about African politics, American involvement in Liberia's civil unrest and man's capacity for violence. Had I not been exposed, through the media, to the atrocities of Rwanda and Darfur I might have found this book too horrific to be believable. Unfortunately, the story rings all too true.