Ahmed's Revenge: A Novel - Hardcover

Wiley, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679457445 ISBN 13: 9780679457442

Publisher: Random House, 1998

Synopsis

The people in Richard Wiley's fiction live in the dangerous territory where cultures and worlds collide. In Soldiers in Hiding, for which Richard Wiley won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction in 1987, the protagonist was Teddy Maki, a Japanese-American whose jazz band was playing in Tokyo at the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Now, in his new novel, Ahmed's Revenge, Wiley introduces us to Nora Grant, a young coffee farmer living in Kenya in the 1970s, a woman whose predicament is less obvious than Maki's but no less dangerous.
        Nora has disbelievingly stumbled upon her husband, Julius, engaged in what appears to be ivory smuggling, one of the Europeans' dirtiest games. Before Nora can confront Julius, he is killed in accidental circumstances that soon look more like murder. Nora investigates her husband's affairs, coming across a        succession of people whose lives intertwine and intersect: her own father, living out his    retirement in England in apparent innocence; Mr Smith, who might be a murderer; Mr N'Chele, who might be a smuggler; Miro, the opera singer; Detective Mubia, a policeman of         divided loyalties--and Ahmed, a massive African elephant, whose remains are preserved at the National Museum in Nairobi and in whose name revenge must be sought.
        Richard Wiley is a craftsman. His eclectic cast of misfits plays out an engaging story  in a superbly wrought atmosphere of post-    colonial tension and drama.

About this title

Review

"I had a farm in Africa, too."

Readers familiar with Isak Dinesen's classic memoir of colonial life in Africa, Out of Africa, will instantly recognize Richard Wiley's witty riff on its famous first line at the beginning of Ahmed's Revenge. Like Dinesen, narrator Nora Grant is a white woman living on a coffee ranch in Kenya; like her, Grant's husband is shot in the second chapter of this fictional "memoir," but there the similarities end, and Wiley takes off on a wild ride through the cutthroat world of ivory poachers and international smugglers. Set in the early 1970s, Ahmed's Revenge is Nora's account of her husband's murder and her own subsequent investigation into it. Born in Kenya, Nora had left Africa for London, where she met and married Julius. When he suggests they return to Kenya and make a go of coffee farming, she agrees, and for a time they are successful. Then Julius is killed and Nora discovers he was in league with ivory smugglers. As she begins to look into her husband's shady dealings, Nora uncovers more than she'd bargained for: not only was Julius involved in the illegal ivory trade, but her father, once a minister of wildlife in the Kenyan government, was, too.

The plot alone would make Ahmed's Revenge a compelling read, but Wiley isn't content just to deliver a mystery. As Nora delves into the truth behind her husband's death, Wiley serves up a disquieting meditation on issues of race, culture, and national identity. A note to the worried: Ahmed's Revenge is not the Kenyan version of that well-known retribution against careless tourists taken by Montezuma; it is a reference to a giant elephant whose skeleton graces the National Museum in Nairobi. It seems only appropriate that his bones serve as the frame around which Wiley builds his fascinating, unpredictable novel.

From the Publisher

Random House editor Ian Jackman: In 1987, Richard Wiley won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel SOLDIERS IN HIDING. His success puts him in some pretty exalted company: Gina Berriault, Richard Ford, David Guterson, Philip Roth, E. Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, John Edgar Wideman, E.L. Doctorow, James Salter, and T.C. Boyle.

Richard's novels (they also include FOOL'S GOLD and INDIGO) take as a theme the cultural collisions expatriates experience - fitting for someone who has lived and worked in Korea, Japan, Nigeria, and Kenya. AHMED'S REVENGE is set in the last of these, a Kenya of colonial farmers, assimilated middle-class Africans, ivory smugglers, and corrupt officials - characters that Graham Greene would have recognized and who V.S. Naipaul would put to good use.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679457445
• ISBN 13: 9780679457442
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320