Francis King: Prodigies

By DAVID HILL

This is terrible. Francis King has written 50 books: fiction, poetry, travel, biography. He has won international awards. He is praised by Melvyn Bragg and Auberon Waugh. Yet up to now, I'd never heard of the guy.

It's another appalling pit in my cultural landscape. And after reading Prodigies, I can't wait to fill it. This is one cracker of a novel.

The narrative premise is dramatic enough. In the mid-19th century, two cultured, cosseted Dutchwomen, a daughter and a nanny decide to escape "this dreadful monotony". They do it by travelling to the very centre of Africa. They're not exactly backpackers. They take with them five dogs, two maids, a butler, six Chippendale dining chairs, a piano ... More than 100 porters and an entire steamer are needed to ferry them up the Nile en route to Sudan. From there, they decide to find the source of the said Nile. Or maybe the Congo. Whichever it is, Alexine, the daughter, will photograph it.

Travellers and plot are driven by Alexine. She's an amazing woman: wilful, passionate, vulnerable to love and anger, sensual and mischievous. Her mother and aunt are wan shadows by comparison - though one of them did have a love child by the Russian Tsar.

The trio's travels are no saccharine wish-fulfilment story. Butchery and bleak death irrupt into the narrative. Easy solutions are eschewed. The discomforts of the women's physical journey are matched by the ordeal of self-exploration it brings.

Realism deflates any romance. The women can travel only because they're grossly rich. The other Europeans they meet are fretful and faded, except for Lucy, who's busy writing a Gothic novel set in Khartoum.

King certainly isn't a modish writer. You can't imagine him being snapped up by the university presses.

His prose is rhythmic with subordinate clauses. He tells as much as he shows. Language spends a lot of time in the rich-to-sumptuous zone.

The novel sweeps grandly across time as well as place. Big, bold scenes parade past: the boat being hauled over the Nile cataracts; the women crossing the desert on mattresses strapped to camels; Alexine learning Arabic from the mountainous Mahfouz, buying a slave-boy in a market or taking an Italian prince as her lover.

In summary? A pageant of a book. This King Rulez.

Arcadia

$44.95

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.