The Death of Rex Nhongo – C.B. George

Rating: 4 stars

An interesting story about British expats and their relationship (if any) to Zimbabwe that kinda failed to deliver

The long:

The Death of Rex Nhongo’s title seems to be about an important man in Zimbabwe, but his death isn’t that important to the rest of the book. It is a disparate collection of stories of a few men in Zimbabwe, mostly Patson, a poor taxi driver and Jerry, the husband of a woman working at the British consulate. They get know each other a bit, and at the end of the story Jerry gets to leave the country and resume his life back in England while Patson ends up in prison and dying for shooting a robber (with a gun that may have been used to kill the titular non-character). It’s more complicated than that, and there are a bunch of side characters, intrigue and things like that. However, the main themes of the book are the relationship of expats and foreigners to the country and relationships, mostly marriages.

The book hits home to me on one subject, expats. Because of my love and study of Italy, I have run into a lot of what the people of the British consulate are involved in, badmouthing their host country. As far as Italy is from Southern Africa, I’ve heard a lot of weird attitudes and denigration of it because of some weird hangup about culture. This is magnified tenfold when you’re talking about a country that’s far away, very culturally different and where almost every native is identifiable by the color of their skin. I think the one scene that stands out most of all is the one where Theo, Jerry’s infant son, is almost drowned at the consulate. They aren’t as upset about that as the prospect of Jerry, unbeknownst to him, admitting the husband of one of their caretakers because they don’t know him. They spout all sorts of racist garbage, but it’s the type that’s acceptable in company that knows being forthright with it is appalling.

A large part of the actions in the story is the delicate dance of fidelity and trust in marriages and the toll they have on the children. The main ones are Shawn’s (an American who seeks to profit off the country’s corruption and loose regulations on mining) eternal betrayal of his Zimbabwean wife, Kuda; Patson and Fadzai, Mandiyevi (a ruthless but idiotic intelligence officer) and his supposedly professional distance from his wife; Jerry and April, and Gilbert with Bessie. They each go up and down with a strong inclination towards pessimism.

Another thing I like is how the story is resolved, with everything going badly from Shawn’s death to Patson going to jail, but Jerry escapes because he isn’t of the country. He doesn’t have any personal investment in bettering the lives of the people there, and even if he volunteers to help others at a clinic, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the systematic disenfranchisement of the nation.

What I didn’t like about the book is twofold. The first is that the pacing felt a bit weird sometimes, and it dragged on quite a few times. There was no individual point in the writing that I didn’t like, but I lost interest at certain points. There was one thing that annoyed me is in the later chapters with Gilbert, he starts quoting Candide and other works. I didn’t think much of it to run into something like this in my younger years, but it irritates me now that I have greater experience and knowledge. The second is that the book didn’t seem to have a larger message rather than the tangled lives of these characters. Well, it may have been ‘look at how screwed up things are in this country’. I don’t hold a lot of books up to this standard, but this one had some promise that I felt it squandered.