Literary Picks "The Flaming Trees of Thika" by Elspeth Huxley

Author: Edward Pickering

Elspeth Huxley's "The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood" brings to mind a book previously reviewed in this column, "My Family and Other Animals" by Gerald Durrell. In content and sensibility, the two books mirror one another. For readers looking for nonfiction writing of the highest caliber, evocative and exotic, these books form an ideal set. Durrell recounts his childhood on the Greek isle of Cos. Elspeth Huxley recalls growing up on a coffee plantation in Kenya during the First World War.
To call Elspeth's memoir "a powerful evocation of time and place" might sound trite, for the phrase is worn out, overused. Yet, it accurately describes the book. Descriptive passages, diffuse and brilliant as the African sunlight, illuminate the pages. For sheer splendor of writing Elspeth's work surpasses, albeit narrowly, Durrell's more innocently delightful memoir. If Durrell's account can be likened to mischievous romp through olive groves, Elspeth's might be likened to a circumspect walk through tall savanna grass. In Kenya, however, those grasses might conceal a lion or leopard.
Young Elspeth arrived in British ruled Kenya in 1913 with her mother and father, who had determined to carve out a living as coffee planters. They began with nothing more than a land deed and devoted the sequent years to constructing and husbanding the plantation, all the while relying on the native Kikuyu people. The account of these years of toil and hardship, discovery and enlightenment is simply mesmerizing. A cultural Proteus, young Elspeth moves easily between the Kikuyu and colonial societies that bound her existence. The animals, the people, the sights and sounds of Africa rush upon her. An imperious intoxicant, the African landscape overwhelms the reader. Even when professing her inability to describe the scene, Huxley, a master writer, triumphs:
"One cannot describe a smell because there are no words to do so in the English language, apart from those that place it in a very general category, like sweet or pungent. So I cannot characterize this, nor compare it with any other, but it was the smell of travel in those days, in fact the smell of Africa - dry, peppery yet rich and deep, with an undertone of native body smeared with fat and red ochre and giving out a ripe, partly rancid odour which nauseated some Europeans when they first encountered it but which I, for one, grew to enjoy. This was the smell of the Kikuyu."
Africa provides the raw material; Huxley shapes it into a literary wonder.