West With The Night by Beryl Markham

I really, really, really wanted to like this book.

The theme of Beryl Markham's memoir, West With the Night, is Girl Power. (Maybe I should say Grrrrl Power?) Markham was raised in early twentieth century Africa, where she learned to hunt with the Murani, set off on her own at the age of seventeen to become a horse trainer, and was the first person to fly a plane solo westward across the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s all exciting, gripping stuff. Or, at least, it should be. Instead, the book is pretty much a lesson in how literary writing can be so crushingly dull, it makes you want to bang your head against the wall while sobbing, “Make it end! Make it end!”

As a commercial writer, I have one main goal – to move the story along. I want my books to be well written, of course, and for the characters to be rounded and intriguing. But that all comes second to the plot, to the pacing of the book. Commercial writers don’t have the luxury of wasting pages in esoteric contemplation of how dewdrops cling to rose petals.

Markham doesn’t feel so encumbered. She’s perfectly happy to witter along about the dull minutia of her life. At one point in WWTN, she rambles on for three paragraphs about her lamp.

Three paragraphs. About a fucking lamp. And then, two pages later, she returns to the lamp yet again.

Now, let me be clear: I love lamps. In fact, I’m a bit obsessed with lamps. My New Year’s Resolution this year was, “I resolve not to buy any more lamps.” (And I’m doing really well: It’s already April, and so far I’ve only bought two.) But not even I could go on for three paragraphs about a lamp. And neither should Markham. Why? Because it’s boring.

There’s some controversy over whether Markham actually wrote WWTN (popular theory has it that it was penned by her third husband, Raoul Schumache, a screenwriter). I think they might be right, because the narrative has a distinctly masculine flavor to it.

This purports to be memoir, and, indeed, Markham recounts, in excruciating detail, a horse race she’s watched or a flight she’s taken. But where’s the emotion? What was she feeling when, at a ridiculously young age, she left her father’s African farm on horseback, alone, and with no plan other than to work with horses? Who was the first man she kissed? Did she ever fall in love? Where’s the romance?

These are details we want, and without them, without a glimpse into the woman that Markham was, it’s hard to get to know her, much less like her – which, by the way, she doesn’t make any easier, what with the occasional shockingly racist comment and the elephant hunting and what not.

Some critics have commented that the controversy over the book’s authorship has kept WWTN from becoming a classic. I disagree. What keeps the book from becoming a classic is that it sucks. It gets a C, and only because it thankfully stopped short of 300 pages. Any longer, and it would have been in solid D country.

 

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