This soap opera tale of adventure, passion, love and ambition is set in colonial Kenya in the immediate post World War I era. Various characters emerging from the trauma of the war, both in East Africa and Europe seek new lives and new beginnings in the promise of Kenya, a territory where His Majesty’s government was actively encouraging European settlement.
Author Bartle Bull weaves his plot against the realistic—and mostly accurate—background of the epoch. Descriptions of Mombasa, the arrival of steamships, railroad travel upcountry, early Nairobi, hunting in the Great Rift Valley and the Aberdares, mule travel north, Mt. Kenya and carving farms out of the wilderness of seized African lands—all ring true. Certainly, the context of Kenya so rendered attracts the attention of a Kenya-oriented reader, but the story is not really about Kenya, rather it uses Kenya and the sometimes unique circumstances of the epoch to craft a story of characters enmeshed in their own ambitions, lusts, hopes and dreams…and an odder set of folks would be hard to assemble: a gypsy boy, a Goan dwarf, a wounded English gentleman, his bizarre aristocratic wife, a Portuguese brother-sister team, a German ex-soldier/settler, a Welsh war bride, an American hunter, a noble Kikuyu, and a cast of supporting good and very bad guys. How all these characters interact constitutes the thrust of the tale.
Bull writes well and the story unfolds at a suitable pace. It is designed to entertain and the coincidences and events—just as in a soap opera—occasionally require suspense of belief, but even so the reader can get caught up in the twists and turns presented. No great truths are discovered or assessed, except that you must play the hand that life deals you and make the best of it. Kenyans get short shrift, only two really figure as minor characters in the novel; the rest are confined to being loyal retainers, but that was truly how they were seen and treated by the British at the time.
In short, The White Rhino Hotel is kind of a fun book to read—good for an airplane or the beach.
This was a re-read for me. I bought a copy from Amazon for about $4. Your local library may also have a copy.
