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From Amazon
Young Vikram Lall's in-betweenness as an Indian in Kenya is brought home to him when he and his sister Deepa become close friends with an African boy, Njoroge, and two English children, Bill and Annie. It is 1953, and while the Lall family celebrates Queen Elizabeth's coronation, Mau Mau rebels are slaughtering white families to protest against British colonial rule, aided by "faithful" African servants and even Indian sympathizers like Vikram's beloved Manesh Uncle. In that tempestuous "year of our loves and friendships," eight-year-old Vikram is initiated into a confusing world of contradictory loyalties and agonizing losses. The shifting moral and political sands of that in-between world will define everything Vikram comes to experience, eventually (as he says on the first page) causing him to be "numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning." Despite this unappealing description of himself, the unheroic hero of M.G. Vassanji's new novel has an engaging voice and an absolutely riveting story to tell. Hiding from his enemies in an obscure Ontario village, he traces the entangled narrative lines that led him to this dangerous and compromised state, quixotically hoping at the end to blaze a new trail towards "truth and reconciliation" in Kenya. In the tradition of the finest political novels, Vassanji filters the hopes and disappointments of the emerging nation through the familiar lenses of family, friendship, passion, despair, and grief. In his moving accounts of Bill and Annie's lost innocence, Njoroge's and Deepa's secretive romance, and Vikram's entrapment in ethical quicksand, Vassanji portrays a country torn apart by ethnic differences and corruption. Carefully poised between humane tenderness and jaded cynicism, between the imperative to name names and the impulse to forgive, Vikram Lall's multigenerational narrative is at once hauntingly sad and generously humane. Vassanji's return to the East African setting of his Giller Prize-winning Book of Secrets is an artistically triumphant one. The In-between World of Vikram Lall ranks with his very best work. --John C. Ball
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