Books: Papa Loves Mamba

MAMBA (232 pp.)—Sfuarf Cloefe—Houghfon Mifflin ($3).

Ernest Hemingway appears to have left the inedible portions of his celebrated prose style littered all over the green hills of Africa. In his latest novel, Old Africa Hand Stuart Cloete, who last year published a perceptive nonfiction account of his dark and complicated continent (TIME, Oct. 3), has taken up the clipped clarity of the Hemingway of life.

The book begins: “After it happened I stayed in the Congo for several months. This seemed the safest and wisest thing to do under the circumstances. Then I went home to England. I took with me The Forest, my first book. It was taken by Collins. It was taken in America. The films bought it . . .”

After such an opening, the astute reader will be aware that this is a book in which the preferred words are short, the shortest being “I.” The principal “I” of the story is a lowbrow, high-income writer who becomes maddened by visions of the girl he left behind him after a farming stint in the Congo. The poor girl, Helen, had been a dance-hall hostess in England. She had foolishly married one Henry Seaman, who at school looked like a “nasty cupid,” bullied small boys and dropped white mice down the fronts of girls’ dresses. By the time he marries Helen, Henry finds himself managing a vast cattle ranch in the Congo. He has also advanced from white mice to other animals—he scares the wits out of the little woman by leaving lizards about the house, and listens unmoved to the screams of a native being devoured alive by driver ants. When Henry turns jealous—for Helen has been meeting “I” in the bamboo thickets—he is inspired to his masterpiece of zoological warfare: he coils a dead mamba on Helen’s dressing table. He is betting on the mamba’s being not only a fearsome and deadly reptile, but one with the habit of seeking its dead mate. The relict of the dead mamba arrives on schedule and bites Helen in the neck. She dies in a few seconds. Whereupon “I”, moved to a mamba-like revenge, ambushes Henry in the jungle and shoots him as dead as Hemingway’s Mrs. Francis Macomber shot Mr. Francis Macomber. It is a neat story, but only its expertise on herpetology, lycanthropy and the flora and fauna of the Congo raises it above popular adventure fiction. The reader would do well to ignore the author’s declaration that “this is the story of the struggle of a man against the forces of evil which drive him, and those of good which inspire him; of a God-woman concept . . .” Not so. It is just a fairly engrossing tropical triangle.