A GUIDE TO THE BIRDS OF EAST AFRICA - A NOVEL
Nicholas Drayson – Penguin - $35

An immensely charming, droll and beguiling novel which does actually have quite a lot to do with the birds of East Africa. The setting is largely Nairobi, Kenya and our protagonist, Mr.Malik, is described as “ a brown man, sixty-one years old, short, round and balding”.
He is also a thoroughly decent, most likeable widower, a really honorouble man, and for the past three years he has been secretly head-over-heels in love with widow Rose Mbikwa the leader of the Tuesday morning bird walk of the East African Ornothological Society.

Here is how the story opens:

“Ah yes,” says Rose Mbikwa, looking up at the large dark bird with elegant tail soaring high above the car park at the Nairobi Museum, “a black kite. Which is, of course, not black but brown”.
Mr.Malik smiled. How many times had he heard Rose Mbikwa say those words? Almost as many times as he had been on the Tuesday morning bird walk.
You never know exactly how many kinds of birds you will see on the Tuesday morning walk but you can be sure to see a kite. Expert scavengers, they thrive on the detritus of human society in and around Nairobi.

Mr.Malik has finally plucked up the courage to invite Rose to the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball,the premiere social event on the Nairobi calendar. Before he can do so however and right out of the blue his nemesis from his school days, the wily smooth-as-silk playboy Harry Kahn arrives at the Asidi Club and makes it known that he also intends to invite the unsuspecting Rose Mbikwa to the Hunt Club Ball. For him of course it is just another conquest to be achieved whereas Mr.Malik is deeply in love with Rose.

A committee of club members is formed and a bird watching competition, complete with detailed written rules is organized in which the man who can spot and record the most birds in the next seven days will be the one who gets to invite Rose to the Ball. She of course knows nothing about this. And in fact this is being done so that she is not put in the awkward position of having to choose between them.

Kahn is a wealthy man so immediately engages a couple of Australian birdwatchers to assist him and using small private aircraft and boats immediately takes a great lead over Mr.Malik who on the second day suffers the catastrophe of having his car and binoculars stolen.

It is great fun, often totally hilarious but there is also another story running alongside the main one. It turns out that Mr.Malik is mourning his estranged son who died of Aids and he writes an anonymous column in the local newspaper which appears to be about bird watching but is in fact sharply satirical stuff about the local political scene.

By the way I should note that Rose Mbikwa was Rose Macdonald before she married Joshua Mbikwa back in 1971. He entered politics and by 1988 had risen to become Deputy Leader of the Opposition before being killed in a suspicious accident in 1988. By then Rose had come to love Kenya as much as her husband had and so she elected to stay on.

It is a marvelously relaxing read about the universal themes of love and friendship, it is atmospheric and I did enjoy the actual bird watching aspect of the story too. I read that someone said this book is a sort of PG Wodehouse meets Alexander McCall Smith and I guess there is something in that. Certainly all three writers can be described as clever and humorous.

I haven’t come across author Nicholas Drayson before but the publishers tell us he is an English-born Australian writer and naturalist, a former journalist who has worked in Kenya and other places, and that this is his third book.

The Bookman reviewed this title with Kathryn Ryan on her Nine to Noon show on Radio New Zealand National on Wednesday.