It starts with loaded guns. A child, answering nature's call, stumbles into her parents' room and is met with a harsh voice that tells her she might get shot. The child grabs her older sister's hand and they go outside into the blank landscape to pee in the loo. It continues to reveal children with ticks and worms, terrorists under the bed, some colonialism, alcoholism and a memoir strong enough to scour one's sense of the world.
That child is Alexandra Fuller, the author of an unapologetic admission of a childhood in Africa, \Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight."" The novel tells the honest and unrelenting story of a family set against the African soil in all its shades of richness. There's the red dirt of the harsh land that produces children who dismantle rifles by the age of five. There's the brown clay of white people in lands judged inhabitable for them. The most fertile loam is in the black earth of a book whose roots reach right to the core of both Africa and its people.
It begins in 1969, a shockingly recent time to the present, in a country with an obsolete name, Rhodesia. Though born in England, Alexandra (Bobo to her family) is African through and through. Her parents are the hardened bodies laboring away against a harsh sun and unforgiving climate. They farm and fight through the war that pits the British against the 'terrorists,' bands of indigenous Africans attempting to take back their land. The nation teeters across a reckless age where ""farmers fight a more deadly, secret kind of war."" Then England loses.
Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe and the Fullers must abandon their land and their livelihood to flee south and start again. They begin to drift, wandering away from what they consider their homeland. Eventually, the family ends up in the strict and censored nation of Malawi, holding their own against the intrusion of a totalitarian system and oftentimes against starvation. Again the young Fuller flees with her alcoholic mother, diehard father and watchful sister to the nation of Zambia. There they find enough scraps of security to settle down once more.
The novel centers around the theme of being on the losing side of a war. It is not just a war against the ""enemy"" in the bush or the lions out the back door, but against the loneliness and hunger of lost people in a distant land. The war is outside the home, with armored convoys and checkpoints along shattered roads, and inside, with scorpions, depression and the despair of an alcoholic mother. The losses go deeper than the boundaries; they extend to the soul of the people.
While the book wraps itself around the themes of movement and transience, it possesses a keen sense of place. There's always an established home and borders within which Fuller can find herself. Africa becomes a home along with every ranch and farm that comes and goes. Alexandra, in a mine-proofed Land Rover, journeys deep into the mind of a nation and continent in the violent lurch of change.
This is a story told with the sounds of gunshots, government spies, land mines, malaria, racism and lost children. The children are once more on both sides of the war. Child soldiers run through the streets with uzis while the memory of three lost children grips both the narrator and all those around her.
""Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight"" is thrilling in its substance, powerful through its voyage and genuine in its ability to move the reader. There's nothing less than the absolute power of resilient people fighting in the dirt with every problem they face. The crisp imagery has the coldness of the most silent time of night but allows for the warmth of the African dawn to bring it fantastic vitality.
The book doesn't back down. The conflict is never distant. Fuller watches a man being beaten and remarks, ""I can hear [his ribs] cracking like the branches of the frangipani tree. His skin splits open like a ripe papaya."" Her words bring the harsh sting of nature to intimate levels. She says ""I have fleabites up and down my arms??they are small, familiar red bumps ' almost friendly."" It overflows with a multitude of battles that overwhelm the reader but never overwhelm Bobo.
Ultimately, the book is about surviving. It is about the day-to-day struggle and the constant yearning. There is nothing resembling security and only shreds of comfort. But humor sneaks around and salvation finds a way in. The family and the narrator lives to give us a stunning account told clearly and beautifully.
