Review: “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel”
Nicholas Drayson

The summer holidays are coming (for some of us anyway) and perhaps you’re thinking about a book to read “on the beach” or in the hammock at home? If you are - and even if you’re not - I’d like to recommend a lovely book that the Penguin Group sent me recently - “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” by Nicholas Drayson. Novels aren’t something we normally review on 10,000 Birds - we’re more into dissecting reference books and the like - but I guess Penguin figured that because the book was about birds (sort of) I might want to review it. I’m very glad they did, because I really enjoyed it.

To be honest before reading “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” I knew nothing at all about Nicholas Drayson other than info I found on the Penguin website which said that he was born in England, has lived and worked abroad (a lot), and “was recently the winner of the inaugural WILDCARE Tasmania Nature Writing Prize”. His first novel, ‘Confessing a Murder’, was published in 2002 and according to an abstract I found online is “the journal of a man who is now the sole inhabitant of a small island somewhere in the Java Sea. He addresses a diary to Charles Darwin, whom he calls ‘Bobby’ and for whom he still holds something like romantic feelings. One of the delights of “Confessing a Murder” is its detailed descriptions of an imagined environment. It includes a lizard with uncanny powers of disguise, frogs that breed by seeming to digest their partners, crabs that work together to fell trees and so on.”

‘Confessing a Murder’ wasn’t, then, what you might perhaps ordinarily expect from a first-time English novelist (who is now, incidentally, consultant to “National Museum of Australia on platypus acquisitions”), especially given the old axiom of “write what you’ve experienced”! In similar vein this new novel, “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel”, isn’t quite what you’d expect either.

I say that because “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” is voiced - remarkably consistently and lyrically - as if written by an unnamed Kenyan whose first language isn’t English, concerns the unrequited love of Mr Malik (a “sixty-one years old, short, round and balding” Kenyan Asian) for a lady called Rose Mbikwa, centres around a gentleman’s watering-hole in Nairobi called the Asadi Club, and features a week-long bird race that is essential to the novel but in some chapters is almost mentioned in passing. In a wonderful sub-plot the author takes very well-aimed swipes at Kenya’s notoriously corrupt government officials, and also finds time to highlight the very real risk of being mugged in broad daylight in this notorious city (not for nothing is Nairobi often nicknamed ‘Nairobbery’ by visiting birders).

I’d loved to have been in on the discussion between author and publisher when he pitched this idea, because what on earth is there in that little lot for most readers to relate to? Looking at that very brief synopsis you might not think that “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” would be your cup of tea at all, as people say over here in the UK.

You’d be wrong though: this is a book about the universal themes of relationships, place, and atmosphere, and the author handles the disparate elements and the (presumably imagined) characters so well and so sympathetically that you’ll feel yourself gently drawn right into the world of Mr Malik, Rose et al and the pages slide past until you’ve suddenly reached the end and find yourself wondering how the time went by so unnoticed…

How best to describe “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” then? A sticker on the front of the copy of the book I was sent contains the quote, “A book of immense charm: a sort of P G Wodehouse meets Alexander McCall Smith”. I’ve never read anything by Alexander McCall Smith, but I’ve read a lot of P G Wodehouse (he of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster fame) and - no disrespect to Mr Drayson at all - I don’t see the connection: both P G Wodehouse and Nicholas Drayson are clever and humourous writers, but P G Wodehouse often wrote about the fumbling, bumbling ways of the upper-classes and the myriad ways they are bailed out of impossible situations by their “lessers”. There is no sense at all in “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” of one set of people being better or cleverer than any other (in fact the author’s even-handedness and sense of equality is one of the things that for me made this book so satisfying).

I’m not even sure either that any novelist in the early phase of their career - even one as good as this one - would be genuinely comfortable with being compared with an author who wrote hundreds of novels and short stories and created a genre that’s instantly recognisable. The quote is spot-on however when it says this is a book of immense charm, because it is. It is understated too, it is fun, it is full of humanity and affection, it is beautifully written, and if you’re anything like me you’ll find yourself smiling all the way through…

Except, that is, on the not too infrequent moments when the experienced birder in you realises that Nicholas Drayson may be many things, but an expert on the birds of Kenya he isn’t….

I hate to bring this up because hand-on-heart I recommend “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” to anyone looking for a slightly quirky and (yes) immensely charming summer read, but there are too many ornithological discrepancies for a self-professed avid - some may say ‘anoraky’ - birder like me to ignore.

It wouldn’t make a jot of difference if it was merely that the author had the odd misplaced species turning up in an unlikely setting, or that a main character dropped a clunker identifying a tricky Kenyan endemic (we’ve all done that!). Unfortunately, however, a few key plot devices that rely on birds are simply impossible: for example, one the birds involved in Rose’s decision to have her eyesight checked has never been recorded anywhere near Nairobi where she’s supposed to have seen it, and later in the novel one of the participants in the bird race - at a critical moment - is allowed to add a bird that is so common around Nairobi that it’s unthinkable that neither he nor his fellow racer wouldn’t have seen one earlier.

There are other instances that are less important but that still niggle. I’ve been to Nairobi many times and the world Nicholas Drayson describes is immediately recognisable and truthful, but - darn it - the pedant in me just can’t pass by these blips without noticing, and it’s a real shame because when I did come across them I was momentarily taken out of the world he so skilfully creates.

However, I’ve a feeling that the vast majority of the people who’ll read this book either won’t notice or couldn’t care less anyway. They’ll be picked up and carried along oblivious and happy, and they’ll be all the better for it really. “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” is enjoyable and entertaining so who really cares whether Mr Drayson’s hero spots a coastal speciality, Fischer’s Greenbul, in his Nairobi garden? Not many of us I suspect.

The more I reflect on “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” the more I realise how much I enjoyed it. It’s not a book that’ll change your life - but it’s a whole world better than you
might expect unless you’ve already read Nicholas Drayson’s previous novels. And if you haven’t I’m willing to wager a small bet that once you’ve read this you’ll want to buy ‘Confessing a Murder’ and ‘Love and the Platypus’. I certainly intend to, and if that’s not a recommendation for you to invest a few pounds/dollars in a book then I don’t really know what a recommendation is.

“A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel” by Nicholas Drayson. Hardback. 202 pages. Line drawings head each chapter. Published in the UK by Penguin/Viking and in the US by Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-670-917570.

Stop Press!. When I wrote this review I really did feel unsettled by having a go at Nicholas Drayson’s birding skills. This is a novel principally about people rather than birds, and I wondered how he would feel about my arrowing in on those “ornithological discrepancies”. To cut a long story short I emailed him and asked - and to my delight received a very friendly and interesting response. With Mr Drayson (Nick’s) permission I’ve written this up into a short post which I’ll be putting online in the very near future. If you’ve ever wanted to know how a novelist thinks (which I did) then you’ll find this fascinating, trust me!