Monday, July 11, 2022

Abduction in the Serengeti

 

A review of The Lioness by Chris Bohjalian, Doubleday, NY, 2022

 

This novel is a thriller with an ostensibly simple plot. A group of movie stars is kidnapped while on safari in the Serengeti in 1964.  Alternating between flashbacks (mostly boring) to key moments in their lives, the protagonists struggle with their captors against the backdrop of vicious wild animals. Death lurks on all sides – from ruthless Russian captors or leopards, snakes, or hyenas. Plenty of people die.

The Africa setting, that is descriptions of the game reserve park are accurate, but geography is way off – equating an easy drive, for example, from the Serengeti to Albertville, Congo. Oops! that is hundreds of miles distant and there is a huge lake in the way.  The motive for kidnapping slowly leaks out as the novel moves forward. It is implausible, but it does keep the tale going. Afterall this is fiction.

The author inaccurately described a wrecked land rover when one character insists that another roll up the windows, so the dead inside won’t be eaten by scavengers.  Land rovers in the 1960s all had sliding windows, not roll-ups.  Similarly, the author describes a leopard attack that probably could never occur. But again, cut him some slack. It is fiction.

As improbably as the story is, I enjoyed the novel.

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