A Sense of Place

There are three things which draw me to particular books and authors, hold me there, and keep me returning. This author may be particularly adept at writing engaging dialog. That author may create likable, although not always smart and moral (I hate it when the murderer turns out to be someone I like) characters. And then there are books which evoke a strong sense of place, which somehow manage to inspire in me the desire to go places and try things which I might not otherwise in my more grounded and sensible moments consider trying, such as staring down an angry bull elephant or flying solo across the Atlantic.

Beryl Markham's 1942 memoir "West With the Night" is one of these books. It was an excerpt from an audio edition of the book which led me to putting this book on hold at the public library. There are some books which I breeze through well before the three week lending period, and others which I don't quite make it through in time, because I find myself savoring passages, thinking, rethinking, reading them to others and asking for their opinion on. I know the book touched something deep within others as well, for on two separate occasions strangers on public transportation recognized the book and counted it among their favorites.

The book follows the author from her early childhood when she and her father moved to Africa, through her young adulthood when she trained racehorses, to meeting a pilot and hearing a call to fly herself, first flying medical supplies to remote areas, then becoming a scout finding herds of elephants, and then deciding that she wanted to fly solo westward from Europe to New York - a flight that had not yet been successfully accomplished by anyone non-stop, and which no woman had done solo.

Descriptions of the animals, of the land, and the people were vivid enough to pull me into the narrative. Descriptions of the safaris made me want to go on a safari myself, although in interest of my pocketbook, I simply bought a safari jacket and called it good. An uncomfortable talk with a man dying of malaria and reminiscences with a childhood friend were real enough to cause me to feel a part of those conversations and feel like I knew those people. Ms. Markham turns a phrase so well that her descriptions of the loneliness of an airplane cockpit and the silence of an African Serengeti night have forever altered the way I think of silence and loneliness.

Such books aren't quick, single-afternoon reads. This is a book to savor over many days, to take time digesting. This is a book to take you to another place and time. And the trip is very enjoyable.

West with the Night