Books in Brief

On the Edge of the Rift: Memories of Kenya, by Elspeth Huxley (Morrow, $5.95). The author of The Flame Trees of Thika turns to her earlier life in Kenya in this autobiographical account of growing up among the coffee and tobacco plantations of the highveldt, the larger cats (a pet cheetah and wildcat), and an English family ten times more British in their isolation than at home. There is neither plot nor self-characterization here, only sensitive and accurate description done with English restraint. But description is of first importance when one has to convey so much of the unfamiliar: Kikuyu and their ways; the postWorld War I planters; hunts and disasters; and the tone of childhood life in an environment both gorgeous and menacing. Mrs. Huxley’s prose approaches the graphic exactitude of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and shares something of that classic’s extraordinary beauty. There is also something of Julian Huxley’s appreciation of African landscape and peoples which informs his Africa. That so much misunderstanding should have sprung tragically out of the way of life Mrs. Huxley describes attests to the reaches of stupidity of both the settlers and native Kenyans in assessing each other’s motives, for if there were antagonisms at the time of our story they are carefully edited out and a beautifully pastoral fiction substituted. A lovingly written memoir to savor, more than to read up quickly. Published in England as The Mottled Lizard.

G. DAVENPORT

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On the Edge of the Rift: Memories of Kenya, by Elspeth Huxley (Morrow, $5.95). The author of The Flame Trees of Thika turns to her earlier life in Kenya in this autobiographical account of growing up among the coffee and tobacco plantations of the highveldt, the larger cats (a pet cheetah and wildcat), and an English family ten times more British in their isolation than at home. There is neither plot nor self-characterization here, only sensitive and accurate description done with English restraint. But description is of first importance when one has to convey so much of the unfamiliar: Kikuyu and their ways; the postWorld War I planters; hunts and disasters; and the tone of childhood life in an environment both gorgeous and menacing. Mrs. Huxley’s prose approaches the graphic exactitude of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and shares something of that classic’s extraordinary beauty. There is also something of Julian Huxley’s appreciation of African landscape and peoples which informs his Africa. That so much misunderstanding should have sprung tragically out of the way of life Mrs. Huxley describes attests to the reaches of stupidity of both the settlers and native Kenyans in assessing each other’s motives, for if there were antagonisms at the time of our story they are carefully edited out and a beautifully pastoral fiction substituted. A lovingly written memoir to savor, more than to read up quickly. Published in England as The Mottled Lizard.

G. DAVENPORT