West with the Night by Beryl Markham: book review

West with the Night (1942) is the memoir of British horse trainer and aviatrix Beryl Markham and her life in Kenya in the 1920s and 30s. Markham was the first female to complete a solo East to West nonstop flight crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a small plane.

Markham (1902-1986) was raised in Kenya when her father left her mother and brother in England and took Beryl to Kenya in 1906 – then called British East Africa.

This is not an autobiography, for Markham does not mention her mother or brother, or her three marriages, nor her son born in 1929. She barely mentions her lover, the iconic Denys Finch Hatton, also the partner of Danish coffee plantation owner and writer Karen Blixen (who penned ‘Out of Africa’), nor of her friendship with Karen and Blor Blixen. She doesn’t address her controversial life as a woman of privilege, because she controls the writing and depicts the life of an adventurer. Critics say that her third husband Raoul Schumaker may have written all or part of the book.

The memoir is mainly about Markham’s Kenyan childhood, her love of horses, and her introduction to small planes and wildlife safaris. Markham poignantly writes of her dog Buller, and flying in the bush looking for lost adventurers, and of her love of Africa. ‘Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just home.’

Of the African desert, she writes: ‘Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of it's coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there.’

If I forget the actual content and controversies, this memoir contains some of the finest writing I have ever read. It is lyrical, poetic, descriptive and evocative. It is impressive and mesmerizing. It is simply exquisite.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).